Fieldnotes
Fieldnotes is a note-taking app for people standing in a bog at 6am — biologists, surveyors, archaeologists. We designed an interface that works offline, one-handed, in gloves, and still looks good back at the desk.
Client
Fieldnotes Labs
Role
Product designer
Services
UX · UI system · Prototyping
Year
2026
Most productivity software is designed for someone at a desk with two free hands and a strong opinion about keyboard shortcuts. Fieldnotes' users are standing in a river. The brief was simple to say and hard to do: make capture instant, make sync invisible, make nothing precious.
Designing for wet thumbs
We threw out the standard component sizes on day one. Every tap target in capture mode is at least 56 pixels, every primary action lives in the bottom third of the screen, and the entire capture flow works with the phone upside down in a chest pocket — voice notes get transcribed and filed against the last GPS fix.
The visual language is deliberately blunt: high-contrast ink on paper tones, one accent, thick rules between records. It reads in direct sunlight and it doesn't pretend a specimen log is a lifestyle product.
The system underneath
- A 40-component UI kit with a strict two-token color budget per screen.
- Offline states designed first, not retrofitted — every screen has a no-signal truth.
- A print stylesheet, because field teams still hand reports to people who like paper.
Every designer we'd worked with tried to make us look like a startup. Chronicle made us look like a tool.Dr. Imani Cole — Founder, Fieldnotes Labs
Fieldnotes shipped to beta with three national survey teams; the capture flow tested at under four seconds from pocket to filed note — half the target.
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