Record
02
Company Two
A dispatch console that runs fourteen hours a day
One operator, one screen. Nine hundred loads a day assigned from a console with sixty clickable regions above the fold and no priority between any of them.
Sector
Logistics
Role
Solo designer
Years
2025
Constraint
Operators never look away. Nothing moves without reason.
The brief was wrong. Kestrel asked for a cleaner screen. What they had was a screen with no hierarchy, carrying a decision that changes every ninety seconds.
I sat behind three dispatchers for a full shift each before drawing anything. The pattern was consistent: they were not reading the board, they were scanning it for four states and ignoring everything else.
The board, unassigned
Decision log
Four that mattered
Forked the spacing scale
The house system was built for marketing pages and wasted a third of a fourteen-hour console. We forked the scale down and wrote the reasoning into the file. Density doubled, and the console now sits outside the system's upgrade path — every shared change lands twice.
Colour reserved for exceptions
Brand wanted the palette visible; operators need four states and nothing else. Everything went neutral except the states that demand action, and the palette was learned in a single shift. It also made the console photograph badly — the screen the business shows off is the one with no brand on it.
A ceiling of 120ms
Motion that reads as polish on a landing page reads as lag when the same action fires nine hundred times a day. Every transition took a hard 120ms ceiling and most were cut to nothing. State changes are now abrupt enough that new operators miss them for a week.
Keyboard first, mouse second
The fastest dispatchers never touched the mouse, so the shortcut map was drawn before the layout and the visuals followed it. Experienced operators got materially faster. Day one is slower than the old board, and every piece of training material had to be rebuilt.
Outcome
Measured twelve weeks after launch
41%
Faster load assignment
18
Interactive regions, from 60
2wk
To full operator adoption
What I would do differently
The part most portfolios leave out
I under-invested in the handover. The spacing fork made sense in context and looked like a violation to anyone reading the system in isolation. Documentation of intent should have shipped with the first component, not the last.