Designing complex forms

Room, category, phase, task, sub-task. Five tiers, and every leaf has its own quantities and prices.

Bathroom, Floor, Construction, Install flooring, Parquet. The estimator needs all five tiers on one page or they lose their place. Then the same quote has to reach the worker laying that parquet, on a phone, outdoors, who wants exactly one task at a time. Same data, two very different readers.

Buildlr had a founder, a market and no product yet. So all of it was designed from zero, in a language I don't speak, for a client whose working day never overlapped with mine.

The tree lives in the left rail, so you always know which room and phase you're in.

Tasks are rows you switch on with a toggle. Open one and its sub-tasks unfold inside it, each with its own parameters, while the cost panel on the right recalculates as you go. Only one task opens at a time. That rule kept the page readable at forty rows deep, and it took a few rounds to accept it as a feature.

Estimators kept getting stuck on things only the client could answer.

Which colour. Which finish. The old habit was to leave the line blank and chase it by email. So the request for information became part of the task. When a task needs a client decision, a suggested RFI appears right there, question pre-written and deadline attached, and the client answers it on their phone. The blank line stays visible until it's filled.

The field app reads the same quote, one worker at a time.

Rooms became filter chips along the top. Categories became accordions. Each task is a card, parameters are label and value rows, and sub-tasks sit one indent in, just like on desktop, so the hierarchy survives the move. Anything still waiting on the client is flagged in red inside the card, because nobody should find that out on a ladder. Once a task is running, everything collapses to three headers and a timer.

On desktop, one page, always in context. On mobile, one task, always in reach.