A form that works with no signal

Field Kit is used by ecologists and aid workers to record observations in places with no connectivity — a rainforest transect, a refugee settlement, a flood zone. If the app loses a day’s entries, someone repeats a day of fieldwork. The stakes make the design constraints unusually clear.

Design principles

Offline is the default state, not the error state. Nothing in the UI implies something is wrong when there’s no connection. Sync is a status, not an alarm.
Every input is recoverable. Entries save to local storage on each keystroke. Closing the app mid-form loses nothing.
Confidence at a glance. A researcher walking between sites needs to know, in one look, that their last three hours are safe.

Three phone screens showing capture, a local queue of pending records, and a completed sync. — Capture → local queue → sync. The middle state is where people live, so it's the state we designed first.

The sync model

Records move through three states — captured, queued, synced — and the interface shows all three at once as a small stacked meter in the header. When a connection appears, queued records upload oldest-first with a gentle progress fill; each one that lands gets a single tick. No spinners, no blocking dialogs, no “are you sure.”

The motion here is deliberately understated. A researcher glancing at their phone in bright sun should read the state from color and fill level alone — animation is a confirmation for people who are watching, never a requirement.

Outcome

Field Kit shipped to three research organisations. In the first season of use across ~40 field workers, zero reported data-loss incidents. The stacked sync meter became the app’s signature element and now appears on the marketing site.