Don't Mess with Texas

Everybody in Texas knows Don't Mess with Texas. It's TxDOT's anti-litter campaign, and part of it lets you report someone you see tossing trash out of a car. They already had an app for that. My team at Rocksauce redesigned it top to bottom, and it shipped.

Here's the catch: a report only counts if it has a plate number, and you only see that plate for a few seconds, at highway speed.

The old app handed you a form. Text fields, pickers, a questionnaire, a review page, all behind a screen telling you not to use it while driving. Right warning, wrong product. If you have to pull over to report someone, you won't.

We added voice driven reporting and added a modern updated look and feel to the app. Users would pop it open, do voice submission, give the information, and submit it. It was designed nice and big so that it could be operated quickly, in the moment, to capture the infraction.

Voice comes first. One question, "What is the license plate number?", and the app shows you what it heard so you can confirm it. The plate is the part you'll forget. Everything else can wait for a parking lot.

Manual entry got the same treatment: one question per screen, one big button. Plate, make & model, color, where the trash came from, what it was, and where it happened.

The redesign shipped for TxDOT. Reporting a litterer went from a form you'd fill out later, or never, to something you can do by voice before the plate is gone.