2 September 2026 · 4 min read
I spent a morning on the shop floor before I designed a single screen
The brief asked for a dashboard. A morning of watching the floor changed what we built, and the order we built it in.
I spent a morning standing next to a machine, not talking to anyone, before I designed a single screen.
The brief said they needed a dashboard. Management wanted visibility into production. Standard request. I could have built it from the brief in a week.
Instead I asked if I could just come and watch for a few hours.
Here's what I saw
The operator's hands were dirty. Genuinely, permanently, machine-oil dirty. Any interface I designed that required precise tapping on a phone screen was going to be used with a knuckle, or not at all.
The floor was loud. Notifications were pointless.
And the person who actually knew the production numbers wasn't the supervisor management had told me about. It was a man who had worked there longer than anyone else on the floor, and he kept it all in a hardbound register he clearly considered his own property. He was not going to hand that over to a dashboard because someone in an office decided it was time.
None of that was in the brief. None of it would have come up in a requirements call.
What we actually built
What we built ended up being much simpler than what was originally asked for. Big touch targets. Almost no typing. And a deliberate decision to keep the register — the system read from what he already recorded, rather than asking him to record it twice.
The dashboard management wanted came out of that. But it was the second thing we built, not the first.
The specification and the floor
I think about this every time someone sends me a specification.
The specification is what the business thinks is happening. The floor is what's actually happening.
Email [email protected] if you have a specification waiting for a quote. We would rather spend a morning where the work happens first, and quote the thing you actually need.