Don't Mess with Texas

Don't Mess with Texas is the Texas Department of Transportation's litter-prevention campaign, and Report a Litterer is the program that lets a Texan turn in someone they saw toss trash from a vehicle. The client had an existing app for it. My team at Rocksauce redesigned that app end to end for TxDOT: a paid engagement that shipped. The case study we published framed the problem as a question, "How Can You Safely Report Highway Littering?", and the answer was a two-path report: voice submission for the moment it happens, manual entry for when the car is stopped.

A litter report is only useful if it captures a plate number, and the plate is only in view for a few seconds while you are driving. The existing app asked for that information as a form: a text field for the plate, pickers for make and model, a multi-step questionnaire and a review page, all behind a safety gate that told you not to use the app while driving. That is the right warning and the wrong product. If the form takes long enough that you must pull over, most people will not report at all. The design problem was how to make the report safe to start in the moment and quick to finish later.

We kept the safety gate, because it is the law and it is the campaign's own message, but we made it one tap: Report Safely, do not use this app while driving, I Agree.

Voice first. The home screen offers Voice Submission ahead of Manual Entry. Voice asks one question, "What is the license plate number?", listens, and shows what it heard so you can confirm it before anything else. Everything that can wait, waits. The plate is the perishable fact; the rest of the report can be filled in from a parking lot.

Manual entry as a card-a-question flow. The manual path breaks the old form into one question per screen with a progress row of dots: the plate (with a notice if it looks like a vanity plate), a make-and-model search that autocompletes as you type, color, where the litter came from (Driver, Passenger, Truck Bed, Other), what was tossed (Fast Food, Drink, Cigarette, Other), where it happened as an address or a description with a map, and an optional details field. Each screen asks for one thing and has one button.

Review, then the record. A review screen lists every answer as a row you can tap back into, then Submit Report. The Reports tab keeps Drafts separate from Submitted so a report started by voice on the road can be finished later, and the Map tab plots where your reports happened. About carries TxDOT's own program copy and FAQs, including that a submission is confidential and that the litterer gets a letter and a litterbag in the mail, and Share asks you to recruit more reporters.

Brand and craft. The old app used a paper texture and serif type. We moved to full-bleed Texas highway photography, the Don't mess with Texas wordmark as-is, a condensed display face for the questions, and the campaign red for the tab bar and gate. The production file also carries 320-point-wide variants of the make-and-model flow so the layout holds on the smallest iPhones.

The redesign shipped for TxDOT. I do not have report volume or store ratings to cite. One note for the record: EX Squared, which later acquired Rocksauce, publishes this same redesign as its own case study, and its site (which I designed) lists Don't Mess with Texas among its showcase clients.