Kudurru Stone

Kudurru Stone is a project management application for land surveying and field service firms. Dorve led the user experience, designed the interface and created the brand, logo and visual style guide, with one guiding idea: the app had to be usable by crews working outdoors, on tablets, often in the sun and next to running machinery.

What set the early version apart was that it was made for people working outdoors, on survey jobs, construction sites and prospecting work, where a phone screen is not enough and the person reading it is usually standing in bright light with equipment moving nearby.

We built the research and personas around the real roles in a surveying firm, the crew chief, the rodman and the office scheduler, and designed for how each of them works during a live job. Because so much of that work happens outside and around machinery, accessibility was a safety concern as much as a usability one. The interface had to be legible at a glance, in daylight and at a distance, so a worker could check a schedule or a status without stopping the task or losing track of what was happening around them. High contrast, large type, plain icons and clear states all came out of that constraint, and the style guide fixed them into a single system built from one Mountain Meadow turquoise.

The app was designed to run on a tablet or iPad in the field and give a full view of crew and worker performance across several job sites at once. Daily schedules and crews sat on a map, with location set either by hand or by Geo IP, so an office could see where every team was and how each job was moving. The first version was deliberately complex and balanced within that complexity. The product has since been streamlined toward a narrower surveying workflow, but the research, the brand and the visual system we built still run through it.