DESIGNING SOFTWARE FOR A WET GLOVE
How we rebuilt the crew portal after a week shadowing field leads in three states.
We spent five days shadowing crew leads in Tampa, Houston, and Charlotte. Watched them try to log materials with cracked screen protectors, soaked nitrile gloves, and full sun on a south-facing roof.
Almost every interaction in the original portal failed. Buttons under 64px were unhittable with gloves on. Modal dialogs got dismissed accidentally. Drop-downs required two-handed scrolling. Photo upload took 11+ seconds on bad LTE because the app re-encoded full-resolution images on the device.
The rebuild stripped the portal to four primitives: today's job stack, photo capture, materials confirm, and homeowner contact. Every primary action is a single full-width 96px tap target. Photos compress on capture and upload silently in the background. Auto-sync runs every 90 seconds when offline buffers flush.
Field-lead time-on-task dropped 47% across the same job types after rollout. Photo-loss complaints (a leading indicator of warranty disputes) dropped to zero. The lesson generalizes: software for the field is graded on what works through one wet glove and three percent battery, not on what looks good in the screenshot.