Yok.la is earlier work and no longer in active development. This page describes what I built and what I learned from it.
Context and problem
Field teams are invisible by default. The people are on sites, in vehicles, at customer locations; the managers are somewhere else, running the day on phone calls and guesswork. Who arrived where, which task is actually being worked on, what has quietly gone wrong: none of it is visible until someone remembers to report it.
Attendance sheets and messaging groups don't fix this. They produce noise at the edges and silence in the middle, exactly where operational decisions have to be made.
What the product did
Yok.la showed where personnel and field teams were, what they were doing, and what needed attention. Check-ins happened with QR codes or NFC at the point of work, so presence was recorded where it happened, not where it was claimed. Tasks carried live status: assigned, in progress, completed, reported.
Everything flowed into one operational view. A manager saw the field as a living system: people, locations, tasks and the events connecting them, instead of a stack of unread messages.
My role
Yok.la was my own product. I built the operations interfaces, the QR and NFC attendance flows, and the live personnel and task tracking.
System architecture
- QR and NFC check-ins
- Task status updates
- Location events
- Check-in recorded
- Task assigned or completed
- Attention flags
- Live personnel map
- Task board
- What needs attention
The field produced events: a QR check-in at a site, a task picked up, a report submitted. The system treated that event stream as the source of truth and rendered it into a live operations view, so the picture on the screen was only as old as the last event, not the last meeting.
Engineering decisions
Check-in with zero friction
A tracking product dies the moment field workers find it annoying. QR and NFC check-ins took seconds and worked at the point of work. The trade-off: less granular data than continuous tracking, in exchange for a flow people actually completed every day.
The event feed is the source of truth
Instead of maintaining a hand-edited status board, everything derived from the stream of field events. Statuses could always be traced back to the event that set them, which kept the operational picture honest.
Product decisions
Visibility before control
Yok.la started by making the field visible, not by trying to command it. Managers got the live picture first; workflow enforcement only makes sense once the picture is trusted.
What I took from it
Yok.la was mine end to end, from the attendance flow in a worker's hand to the operations screen. It taught me to design around the person who has the least time for the software.