Designing for gloves, bad light and no signal
Field software breaks every assumption a desktop dashboard is built on. What we learned shipping to 1,100 engineers.
Yuki Tanaka
Design Lead
A substation at 7am in January is the real design environment: low light, thick gloves, no signal, one free hand. Every convention from web dashboard design has to be re-earned there.
Touch targets went to 56px minimum. Contrast went well past WCAG AA because AA assumes an office. The primary action moved to the bottom third of the screen, inside thumb reach.
The single highest-impact change was not a control at all. It was a per-job sync status chip. Engineers had abandoned the previous app because they could not tell whether their work had saved.
Trust is a design requirement. If people cannot see that the system did what they asked, they will keep the paper backup — and then you have two systems.