Dispatch Board Redesign
The Dispatch Board is a critical tool for operations teams to assign, track, and manage jobs in real-time. The legacy board, while functional, suffered from performance issues, limited flexibility, and a dated user experience. My redesign focused on modernizing the interface, improving performance, and introducing new features to empower dispatchers with greater efficiency and control. The ServiceTitan dispatch board helps today’s home and commercial service companies optimize technician tracking—so everyone stays on time.
Before
After
Main Improvement Areas
Performance: Optimized data loading and UI rendering for faster interactions.
Holding Area: Designed a modular panel with multi-criteria filtering (status, priority, location, etc.).
Drag-and-Drop: Implemented clear visual cues for job assignment and error prevention.
Board Views: Created toggle controls for switching between vertical/horizontal views, ensuring layout consistency.
A particular aspect that required additional attention was the drag-and-drop functionality. While this interaction is often seen as user-friendly and visually intuitive, it presents notable accessibility challenges—especially for individuals who use keyboards, assistive technologies, or have limited motor abilities.
Holding Area
Simply put, holding area is a Visual Staging Zone for Unassigned Jobs on the Dispatch Board. Dispatchers currently lack a visual way to manage unassigned jobs on the Dispatch Board. To work around this, many customers create dummy technicians or fake teams just to have jobs appear near the techs who may eventually take them. This workaround introduces noise, complicates technician views, and creates inaccurate reporting. Most importantly it removes burn real dollars on managed tech licenses for dummy techs. The Holding Area removes this need, delivering immediate cost savings and operational clarity. All unassigned jobs today appear only in the Jobs Tray, a table-based UI located below the Dispatch Board. While functional for basic job lookup, the Jobs Tray lacks:
Visual context (e.g., where the job “sits” in the daily flow)
Discoverability (easy to miss or ignore for new users)
Drag and Drop: Accessibility Challenges
Keyboard-Only Users: Traditional drag-and-drop requires precise mouse or touch movements, which are not possible for users who navigate solely by keyboard. Without accessible alternatives, these users cannot move or assign items, excluding them from core functionality.
Motor Impairments: Users with tremors or limited dexterity may struggle to hold down a mouse button while moving an item, making drag-and-drop actions difficult or impossible. This can lead to frustration and task abandonment.
Assistive Technologies: Many screen readers and alternative input devices have limited or no support for drag-and-drop gestures, making it hard for visually impaired users to understand or interact with draggable components.
Cognitive Disabilities: The sequence and mechanics of dragging can be confusing for users with cognitive disabilities, further limiting accessibility.
This means that if dragging is not essential, there must be an alternative method—such as a single click or tap, buttons, or keyboard shortcuts—to accomplish the same task.
The new design aligns with WCAG 2.2 requirements, improves usability for everyone, and ensures that no user is excluded due to their input method or abilities.
To ensure our Dispatch Board is accessible to all users, we implemented a click-and-drop mechanism instead of relying solely on drag-and-drop. This approach allows users to:
Select an item (via mouse, keyboard, or assistive device)
Choose a destination with a second action (click, keypress, or tap)
Complete the assignment without requiring simultaneous movement and selection
Board View
Ensuring consistent and responsive layout across orientations. Additionally, tailored the vertical daily board view to suit different user needs: small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) benefit from the vertical view’s simplicity and focus, while medium to larger tenants typically prefer the vertical daily board view for its scalability.
Developed the weekly board view feature, enabling tenants and dispatchers to gain a clear overview of jobs spanning multiple days—particularly useful for multi-day jobs like excavation by visualizing job timelines across the week.
These enhancements will improve user experience by providing flexible viewing options, operational clarity, and better alignment with tenant size.
Usability Test Result
We had a total of 75 participants, with 65 successfully completing the usability test on their first attempt, while 7 participants did not. This explains why the heat map appears scattered. It’s understandable that users experienced some confusion, as the UI is entirely new and includes several toggle-like buttons that might lead users to believe they control the board view. However, given the high success rate, there is little cause for concern regarding this specific change and task.
