Booking an Electrician
Shouldn't Feel Like Work
A customer-facing mobile app design for a San Diego electrical contractor that compresses the entire booking-to-payment journey into four screens.
"Service industries treat their app like a phone book with a payment button. The opportunity isn't to digitise the call. It's to make the call unnecessary."
Role
Product Designer
Client
BAV Electric
Location
San Diego, CA
Status
Design complete, build on hold
The Booking Flow
Four screens. Under sixty seconds.
01 — The Context
BAV Electric is a licensed electrical contractor operating across San Diego County. Residential and commercial work. Panel upgrades, EV charger installs, smart home wiring, lighting design, solar tie-ins.
The business runs the way most trades businesses run — phone calls, text threads, and a dispatch board. That model works. It also caps growth. The booking experience is a friction surface that loses customers at every step.
Calling hours
9 to 5 only
Quote turnaround
Up to a day
Arrival visibility
None
Payment
Handed phone on job site
Each of those is a small annoyance. Together they are the reason most homeowners default to a Yelp search instead of repeat business. BAV came to us with a clear ambition: build the customer-facing app that turns one job into a lifetime customer.
02 — The Bet
The app should make the call unnecessary.
Not faster — unnecessary.
— 01
Compress the inherited model
The default move in service-business apps is to digitise the existing phone call. A form replaces the dispatcher. A booking flow replaces the back-and-forth. The friction stays roughly the same — it just moves to a screen. We bet the opposite. The app should absorb the full journey: discover, book, track, approve, pay.
— 02
Design for trust first
Trades businesses live and die on trust. The app had to feel like a real licensed contractor, not an on-demand gig platform. That shaped everything: the technician profile design, how pricing is communicated, the credential surface on the tracking screen, and the receipt structure after the job.
03 — My Role
Product Designer
Customer Research
Interviewed real BAV customers to map the existing booking journey and its failure points — where calls were missed, where quotes stalled, where payments felt awkward.
Information Architecture
Structured the full app from the first-open state through job history. Every screen had to earn its place in the navigation model.
Booking Flow
Interaction design for the four-screen booking compression. Translated three distinct customer intents (emergency, planned upgrade, remodel) into a single surface.
Tracking & Credentials
Designed the live technician tracking surface — borrowing the pattern from rideshare, the credential surface from medical apps.
Scope Approval
The most complex screen in the app. A structured proposal that moves from the technician's device to the customer's phone and becomes the legal record for the job.
Payment & Receipt
Apple Pay and Google Pay first. Itemised receipt with licence number and warranty terms. Designed as a referral artifact.
Design System
A trade-specific component library: job cards, technician profile blocks, scope-of-work proposals, receipts. Built to be reused across subsequent service-business engagements.
Handoff
High-fidelity prototypes and design system documentation for engineering handoff. The build is on hold on the client side; the design work is complete.
"Trade businesses live and die on trust. The app had to feel like a real licensed contractor, not an on-demand gig platform."
04 — The Build
Four critical journeys
Book. Track. Approve scope. Pay. Each gets its own design treatment — and its own design rationale.
The booking flow
Most service-booking apps run users through a ten-step funnel. We compressed BAV's down to four screens. The first screen surfaces the three most common job types as visual cards so customers don't have to know the trade vocabulary.
The second pulls the address from device location. The third offers same-day, next-day, or schedule. The fourth confirms the technician and the time window. The whole flow takes under sixty seconds end to end.
Live technician tracking
Once the booking is confirmed the app shifts into tracking mode. Real-time location, an honest arrival window — not a five-minute promise that turns into ninety — and the technician's name, photo, licence number, and review history on a single screen. The tracking pattern borrows from rideshare apps. The credential surface borrows from medical apps. The combination is the reason a customer opens the door without anxiety.
Design decision: showing the licence number on the tracking screen was a deliberate trust signal, not a compliance detail. Customers told us in research that knowing who was coming mattered more than knowing when.
On-site scope approval
When the technician arrives and the job scope shifts — and it always can — the technician sends a structured scope-of-work proposal directly to the customer's phone. Line-itemed parts, labour, time estimate, total. The customer approves with a tap or requests changes. Every approved scope becomes the on-record agreement for the job. The awkward doorstep negotiation over a paper estimate is gone.
Design decision: the proposal had to feel like a document, not a pop-up. Heavy typography, clear line items, visible totals. The customer is signing off on work happening in their home — the screen had to earn that weight.
Payment and receipt
Payment happens through the app, not by handing a card reader to the customer after a long day on a job site. Apple Pay and Google Pay first, card fallback second. The receipt is structured, itemised, and downloadable — with the technician's licence number and warranty terms embedded. Trade businesses that handle payment cleanly earn referrals. The receipt is part of the referral funnel.
Design decision: the receipt is as important as the booking flow. A homeowner who gets a clean, itemised, warranty-stamped receipt for a panel upgrade will show it to their neighbour asking about EV charger installs.
Customer profile and job history
Returning customers see their job history as a persistent record. Every panel upgrade, every circuit added, every smart home device wired — dated and itemised. That history is genuinely useful for any subsequent electrical work, and turns into the natural reason a customer picks BAV again instead of starting a new Yelp search.
05 — Design System & Visual Direction
The visual system is deliberately quiet. Trade businesses lose customers when their app looks like a startup.
Typography
Heavier weight. Restrained size hierarchy. The app reads closer to a banking interface than a delivery app — a deliberate choice to signal reliability over speed.
Colour palette
Navy and warm yellow that mirrors the existing BAV brand. Both colours read as established and trusted. Neither reads as startup-adjacent.
Motion
Generous spacing. No animation that doesn't serve a clear purpose. The UI earns attention through clarity, not movement.
Trade-specific component library
Generic mobile design systems don't handle trade-business surfaces well. The component library covers the gaps: job cards with status, scope, and pricing; technician profile blocks with licensing and review credentials; scope-of-work proposals with line-itemed parts and labour; receipts with embedded warranty terms.
These components were designed to be reused across other service-business builds, not just BAV's app. Two subsequent service-business briefs at the studio have already referenced this library as a starting point.
06 — Deliverables
38 screens across the full customer-facing flow
Complete component library for trade-specific UI patterns
High-fidelity interactive prototype — book, track, approve scope, pay
Design system documentation for engineering handoff
Customer research findings mapping the booking journey and its failure points
07 — Why It's on the Portfolio Even Though It's on Hold
Design work is design work. The build status of any given project depends on factors that are often outside the design team's control — funding, internal priorities, leadership changes. The work here is real, the customer research is real, and the design system is reusable on any subsequent service-business build.
It demonstrates range
Most of the rest of the Luvon portfolio is Web3 and AI. BAV proves we can design for a normal consumer audience in a service industry.
It demonstrates research-led thinking
The customer journey mapping and the choices made in the four-screen booking flow are textbook examples of how to compress an inherited business model into a modern interface.
It demonstrates reusable design system thinking
The trade-specific component library will outlive this project and inform every subsequent service-business engagement we take on.
08 — What It Unlocked
BAV is the project that clarified the Luvon position on non-Web3 work. The agency can design for any consumer audience. We don't pretend everything needs a wallet or a token.
The trade-specific component library has already been referenced internally as a starting point for two subsequent service-business briefs. The four-screen booking compression has become a default constraint we apply to any on-demand booking flow that comes through the studio.
Booking compression as a default constraint
Four screens. Under sixty seconds. The constraint has become the opening question on every service-business brief since: how many steps can we actually remove?
Trust as a design material
The credential surface, the receipt structure, the scope-approval flow — all of them are now studio patterns for any context where the customer is letting someone into their home or business.
"Service industries treat their app like a phone book with a payment button. The opportunity isn't to digitise the call. It's to make the call unnecessary."
"Trade businesses live and die on trust. The app had to feel like a real licensed contractor, not an on-demand gig platform."
"Trades businesses that handle payment cleanly earn referrals. The receipt design is part of the referral funnel."
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