A field-reporting app that let gas controllers and environmental engineers document spills, leaks, and emissions the moment they happened — with gloves on, in direct sun, on a signal that came and went.
Environmental events — gas leaks to atmosphere, spills to soil, spills to water — trigger different regulatory workflows in every state DCP operates in. Some are rigorous, some relaxed. The legacy tool, OPSTools, had a bad reputation in the field and low adoption. Operators worked around it instead of through it.
My goal: capture events in the moment, route the right data to EHSS/Enablon for emissions and spill calculations, and make the whole thing simple enough that a field operator would actually reach for it under pressure.
Operator Billy Ops, Giddings Gas Plant, Permian TX. Condensate breaches secondary containment from Tank 3A, flows toward a pond.
He shuts off the pump, notifies his supervisor, photographs the site, and logs the event on his phone — before ever reaching a desk.
I met with Environmental Specialists, Managers, and Operators to walk through an initial hypothesis flow, then challenged it directly against how people actually work a spill in the field. That produced a simple four-part sequence — Location → Impact → Details → Review — with a modular recording step so an event could be logged as air, soil, water, or any combination, instead of forcing operators through fields that didn't apply.
I led the project and was the face of it for every user and region involved — directing a research/design consultant's time on this work, and coordinating with the designer building the shared component library that Eve's funding and priority made possible.
In the field, operators report while managing an active situation — often wearing gloves, in direct sunlight, with signal that drops in and out. That ruled out the dense, form-heavy pattern of the legacy tool. I replaced it with a map-first interface built to work with no connection at all, syncing the moment signal returned.
⚠ Offline — changes will sync when signal returns
| Version | What shipped |
|---|---|
| V1 | Enhanced OPSTools with Enablon fields for every state workflow. Virtual usability testing across all regions. |
| V2 | Full rebuild on a new Angular Material design system, then Ionic Mobile. Validated on-site, in the field, across all four regions. |
Eight field operators tested the full flow on location. The library and its overall value validated at 8/8 — but individual moments in the flow told a more specific story about where the design still had work to do.
Validation framework: 8/8 = validated · 5–7/8 = marginal, needs rework · <5/8 = invalidated. The discovery-moment and equipment-detail gaps directly shaped the V2 rebuild.
The Location → Impact → Details → Review sequence validated here in 2018 became the backbone of Earth Steward, my 2026 MIT xPRO capstone — proof this pattern holds up across an entirely different domain, from oil-field spills to forest stewardship.
See it applied in Earth Steward →