How we work
We build for the counter, not the boardroom
Software for small business is often designed as though someone will sit down to use it. Mostly they are standing, holding something, with a person waiting.
There is a particular kind of business software that demonstrates beautifully and fails in use. It has dashboards, layered navigation and a settings tree. It was designed for the person evaluating it, who sits at a desk, unhurried, exploring, rather than the person who will use it four hundred times a day.
What the counter demands
The person billing has one hand free. There is a queue. They are interrupted mid-transaction and must resume without losing it. They need one number, a price, a balance, a stock figure, and they need it without leaving what they are doing.
Those constraints rule out a great deal of otherwise reasonable design. Depth is expensive. Confirmation dialogs are expensive. Anything that requires reading is expensive.
What this changes in practice
- The frequent action is the largest target on the screen, not the most prominent brand element.
- Information needed during a task appears in the task, not one screen away.
- Nothing required is asked for at a moment the person cannot answer it.
- The system tolerates interruption, because interruption is the normal case.
The boardroom still gets its view
None of this argues against reporting or analysis. It argues about which one gets designed first. Build the counter properly and the reports have trustworthy data to work with. Build the dashboard first and you get elegant summaries of numbers nobody entered accurately.
This is also why we ask to watch the busiest hour rather than be given a requirements document. The document describes the business. The hour describes the constraint.