CargoSnap was run by an individual who wanted to create an easier and more robust system to report damaged goods in sea containers. This meant developing a cross-platform application which could be run on the most used phone in that sector (the CAT S41). There also was an online platform where the data would be sent to from the phone and where the operator could monitor the reports.

I was hired to look at the app and find issues in the way users interact with the interface and further develop the app. I quickly found it to be unintuitive for users to manually fill in barcodes or container codes, as this took too much time. This also explained why some patrols were filing in “dummy data” which made the app functionality useless.

To prevent patrols from being able to fill in dummy data, I advised CargoSnap to use a Barcode scanner and a OCR scanner plugin within the framework they used (Cordova). This way they can register new containers or orders quicker, and they are forced to fill in the container or barcode seriously because their request can be traced back using the image.