I’m literally writing this while sitting at an operating site, watching good people try to make sense of a digital tool that was clearly designed by someone who’s never actually done the job. The usual suspects – clunky interfaces, wrong workflows, and that special kind of frustration that comes from knowing your users will forget everything you just taught them the second you leave.
And you know what? I’m over it. Done. I am fed up with software that doesn’t just work for my field workers, and with wasting time trying to make it work with them. I’m tired of dealing with arrogant vendors that take six months for a minor product change.
The Beautiful Simplicity of Things That Just Work
The thing about great design – you don’t notice it. It just makes sense. Like the first time you used an iPhone – nobody handed you a manual. You just picked it up and started using it because it worked the way your brain expected it to work.
That’s what industrial software should be like. When someone’s managing critical infrastructure, operating heavy equipment, or dealing with emergency situations, the last thing on their mind is figuring out how to use the digital tool. As a result of the nature of the industrial end user – they’re too busy making real decisions to screw around with a user interface that’s not intuitive. If paper is easier, they will use paper.
The Real Cost of Garbage UX
When we accept crappy user experiences as “just how it is” in industrial settings, it has real consequences. And we’ve been doing this for years because we’ve been handcuffed to a few flagship products in the industrial market.
First, your people spend half their day wrestling with technology instead of doing actual work. That’s time stolen from productive work.
Then there’s the training nightmare. You roll out a new digital tool, spend weeks training everyone, feel good about adoption, then come back six months later to find people have invented different workarounds to avoid using the tool. Why? Because the tool sucks.
But here’s what really gets me fired up – the safety implications. When people are frustrated with their tools, when they develop sketchy workarounds to avoid using proper systems, that’s when accidents happen. Poor UX isn’t just annoying; it’s dangerous.
Why It Hurts My Soul
I’m currently sitting here watching these guys – good, seasoned operators – struggle with software that should be making work easier. And I can see it in their faces. They’re being polite, they’re trying to learn, but I know I’ve failed them. Because the software fights them every step of the way, and frankly, paper does a better job than what I’m giving them. I’m enabling bad design and trying so hard to make it work, but this crap has to stop. The timing is ripe for better products with the new technology that’s coming out.
What Good Looks Like (When We Bother to Do It Right)
Good field software understands context. It knows you only need three big buttons to do three tasks on the app in the field. It knows you might be wearing gloves, so buttons are big enough to hit. It knows connectivity might be spotty, so it fails gracefully and syncs when it can. It follows patterns people already understand.
It assumes intelligence, not ignorance. Field workers are experts at their jobs. The digital tool should leverage that expertise. It is imperative that digital tools are developed with the end user.
Most importantly, it gets out of the way. The best field tools are invisible – they help people do their jobs better without making them think about the software itself.
Time to Advocate for the Field Worker
My radical proposal – let’s stop accepting garbage. When vendors pitch you their “revolutionary” solution, ask them one question: “How did you build this product?” If their answer doesn’t include front-line workers, walk away. If they start talking about web-based training – run.
When you’re evaluating tech, don’t look at feature lists. Put it in front of actual users without any training or direction. If people struggle – that’s your answer right there.
Involve actual field workers in the design process. Not at the end as beta testers, but from the beginning as partners. They know things about their work that no amount of requirements gathering will capture.
What’s Next
Field workers deserve digital tools that respect their intelligence, understand their environment, and help them do their jobs better. They don’t deserve to be guinea pigs for half-baked interfaces designed by people who’ve never set foot on a job site.
Good UX isn’t about making things pretty (though that doesn’t hurt). It’s about making things work. It’s about respecting people’s time, expertise, and safety.
And until we demand better – until we stop accepting “that’s just how field software is” – we’re going to keep having the same conversations, the same training sessions, and the same frustrations.
Time to raise the bar. Our field workers deserve it, our operations need it, and honestly, those of us supporting these systems are tired of apologizing for other people’s design failures.
Let’s build software that doesn’t suck. It’s not that hard – we just have to have the humility to realize we don’t know everything on our own.
DIGITAL meets INDUSTRIAL 