One of the most frustrating things a frontline employee can experience:
A list of things to fix from a report you don’t have access to.
I got an email from my manager. ~35 work orders I needed to close. Inactive. All I had was a screenshot from a report I couldn’t access. To close them in SAP, I’d have to manually type all 35.
That’s room for error. That’s terrible user experience. That’s a frontline employee doing manual work that shouldn’t exist.
As much as that frustrated me, it taught me something.
If you design systems for the people actually using them, not for reporting, not for ease of deployment, everything changes. This is where organizational alignment happens.
They give you honest input. They actually use what you build. When frontline teams have real visibility into their work, operations move.
This single experience shaped how I design every intelligence system now. And it’s the reason I obsess over accessibility.