ArcGIS Field Maps: Building a Scalable Mobile Platform
A B2B enterprise mobile app supporting field workers, rebuilt across iOS, iPadOS and Android to improve usability, scalability, and performance.
Company
Esri
Timeline
1.5 years
Responsibilities
Design Systems • UI Design • Accessibility • Prototyping • Documentation • Developer Handoff
Team
Product Designer II • Lead Product Designer • 3 QA Engineers • 4 Developers
Overview
ArcGIS Field Maps, is an all-in-one field B2B SaaS/Enterprise application that uses data-driven maps and mobile forms to help field workers capture, edit, and manage geospatial data in real time.
The project focused on rebuilding and aligning the native iOS and Android apps on new codebases to improve long-term scalability, performance, and maintainability while modernizing the design system and streamlining design workflows to support future feature development.
Problem
As ArcGIS Field Maps evolved, the existing mobile experiences were built on legacy design assets and older platform guidelines, making the product increasingly difficult to scale and maintain across iOS and Android. Visual inconsistencies, outdated components, and fragmented workflows slowed feature delivery and created friction between design and engineering.
At the same time, both mobile apps were being rebuilt on new codebases creating a key opportunity to modernize the design system in parallel. The team needed to align with the latest iOS and Android standards while ensuring the experience remained accessible, human-centered, and adaptable for future enterprise growth.
Research & Insights
User insights were gathered through a centralized research team and a public Esri Community site, while Product Managers maintained continuous feedback loops with enterprise customers through regular calls and partnerships. These insights informed design priorities, platform decisions, and accessibility improvements.
Design collaborated closely with Product and Engineering to translate these insights into scalable system improvements, balancing human-centred experience design with technical modernization.
In parallel, competitor products and market standards were evaluated to identify feature gaps and opportunities as part of the broader platform revamp.
Rather than treating research as a one-time phase, insights continuously informed design decisions throughout the rebuild.
Prioritizing Features
I worked with the PM to determine which ideas we wanted to test and prioritize them based on the engineering effort with customer demand and feature usage frequency.
System Audit & Platform Alignment
To support the rebuild, we evaluated existing UI patterns, workflows, and components across both platforms to identify inconsistencies, outdated conventions, and areas of complexity.
This audit revealed fragmentation between iOS and Android experiences, legacy design assets, and opportunities to simplify workflows for non-GIS users.
These findings informed which components could rely on native system patterns and where custom solutions were required.
Design System Execution
The rebuild prioritized alignment with Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and Google’s Material Design 3, maximizing native components for performance and accessibility while building custom components where product needs required it.
I led the transition of Android Sketch libraries from Material Design 2 to Material Design 3 and partnered with engineering to maintain structural consistency across platforms.
Custom components were designed to follow native conventions while supporting Field Maps’ unique workflows, ensuring platform parity without sacrificing usability.
Human-Centered Workflows & Feature Design
Related Data & Features
This release introduced an entirely new way to view related records directly within a feature, allowing users to access associated reports and spatial data without leaving the map.
Previously, field workers had limited visibility into related features connected to map items, creating friction when validating assets or reviewing historical data in the field.
Based on customer feedback, we improved the navigation across related data and reduced context switching by making nested records easier to discover, add and navigate.
This work also required cross-product collaboration with the ArcGIS Map Viewer team, requiring us to design mobile-friendly patterns that respected both platform conventions and shared system logic.
The resulting flow balanced discoverability with performance, supporting complex spatial relationships while remaining digestible for non-GIS users
Product Flows & Feature Enhancement
With scalable foundations in place, we applied the updated system to real user workflows, redesigning existing flows and introducing new experiences to improve clarity, performance, and usability in the field.
I contributed to the design of key workflows across mapping, asset identification, data capture, and editing, focusing on:
Simplifying complex GIS interactions into digestible, task-oriented flows
Improving navigation and information hierarchy across bottom sheets and detail views
Designing new feature experiences aligned with native platform patterns
Ensuring parity between iOS and Android while respecting platform conventions
Reducing cognitive load for non-GIS users completing assigned tasks
These flow improvements helped translate system-level decisions into tangible user-facing impact.
Accessibility Foundations
Accessibility was treated as a core product requirement.
I led testing of both legacy and rebuilt experiences using VoiceOver, TalkBack, and dynamic text sizing to uncover usability gaps. This informed improvements to navigation semantics, adaptable layouts, error states, and interactive feedback.
Standards were established for labels, states, hints, and gestures across variable components, strengthening accessibility across iOS and Android. Cross-team collaboration across the company helped surface platform-level limitations and opportunities for foundational improvements for mobile.
Styleguide & Design Documentation
To support long-term scalability and faster delivery, I helped establish clear design documentation and usage guidelines for both system and custom components, and overall workflows.
This included defining:
Component anatomy and variants
States, behaviors, and interaction patterns
Accessibility standards (labels, hints, gestures, dynamic type support)
Platform-specific guidance for iOS and Android
When to use system components versus custom solutions
These guidelines served as a shared reference for design, engineering, and QA, reducing ambiguity, improving consistency, and enabling more efficient collaboration across teams.
Styleguide & Design Documentation
Rebuilding Field Maps required balancing user experience, platform conventions, and engineering realities.
Key tradeoffs included:
Native vs Custom Components
Prioritized system-provided components wherever possible to support scalability, performance, and accessibility. Custom components were introduced selectively when native options could not support critical workflows or expected platform patterns.
Visual Parity vs Implementation Parity
Decisions were made case by case to either match visual patterns across platforms or preserve native implementation favoring long-term maintainability and reuse over one-off custom solutions.
Accessibility vs Delivery Constraints
Championed accessibility as a product initiative, leading audits across iOS and Android and establishing standards for navigation, adaptive layouts, and component semantics. While meaningful progress was achieved on iOS during the rebuild, Android accessibility improvements were deferred due to shifting product priorities highlighting the ongoing challenge of balancing inclusion with delivery timelines.
Field Maps 25.2.x
The new release packs powerful updates that transform how mobile workers explore, capture, and share maps in the field. It is designed to boost productivity, improve data accuracy, and create smarter mobile workflows–pushing field operations to the next level.
Lessons Learned
With how complex Field Maps is, this was a massive undertaking due to the dependance of features among each other across the app. Participating in the various aspects of the workflow right from digesting user feedback, transitioning our design systems, delivering designs and documentation, and collaborating closely during implementation and testing gave me a great foundation for native mobile design.
Time and time again, I learned the importance of having not only a shared vision, but a shared set of guiding principles across all disciplines. It kept us focused and efficient, and created a common language that everyone understood.
The project highlighted the need to be respectful of time and effort so that no feature teams were hindered in case of dependencies. In a way, I also learned to be less selfish, and to recognize that wanting to devote time into something that I may be personally invested in at the possible expense of pushing the release forward isn't the best, even though it may be for the betterment of the product.
Upon release, certain instabilities were reported by users, and the team rallied around a plan and responded quickly and efficiently with patch updates addressing critical issues. It was a look into adapting for change management, and the importance of always listening to our customers so that we can support the important work they do.
There was a great deal of trust held and given freely between us as a team, and has since set us up for even smoother collaboration.
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