Built for the phone, because that is where the work happens

In most of the businesses we work with, the people generating the information are standing up. The site engineer issuing material. The technician finishing a visit. The stylist between clients. The person receiving a delivery at the back door.

The desk is where the information is eventually typed in, hours later, from memory. Every hour of that delay costs accuracy, and the small items are the ones that vanish.

• Entry has to be completable one-handed, standing, in poor light, in under about fifteen seconds.
• It has to tolerate a bad connection, because sites and basements have one.
• It cannot depend on a keyboard for the common path. Selecting beats typing.
• It has to survive interruption. A form that loses everything when a call comes in will be abandoned.

These are not preferences. Each of them is a specific way that field data capture fails, and each corresponds to a habit of writing things on paper instead.

A responsive layout that fits a desktop form onto a phone is not the same thing as designing for the phone. The form still has thirty fields; they are now stacked.

The field version of a task usually needs fewer fields than the office version, because the person in the field knows less and needs to record less. Deciding which fields those are is the actual design work, and it is specific to the job.