Person

Four Screens and Why They Look Like That

JM Jonah Mercer

I would rather show the reasoning than the pixels. Each of these is a real project, with the constraint that shaped it and the thing I got wrong first. Client names are used where they said yes. Numbers are theirs, not mine.

01 Work on shift

Screens used by people who are standing up, under time pressure, or outdoors. Different rules apply and most design advice is written for someone sitting at a desk.

Dispatch board, fourteen truck plumbing contractor

One screen, no scrolling, readable from four feet away. The dispatcher runs it on a wall monitor and a phone at the same time and never touches a mouse.

The old system was a spreadsheet plus a whiteboard plus the dispatcher's memory, and the memory was the load bearing part. When she took a week off the whole thing wobbled. Constraints that decided the design. She looks at the board from across the room, so type is large and status is colour plus shape, never colour alone. She is on the phone constantly, so every action has a keyboard shortcut and nothing requires a drag. Techs in the field see the same job card on a phone in a crawlspace, so it is one column and the address and gate code are at the top where a thumb can find them. What I got wrong first: I built a lovely drag and drop timeline. She never used it once. Dragging needs two hands and she has one hand on a phone. Replaced with type ahead assignment, which she uses about two hundred times a day.

Free clinic intake, Tenderloin

Nine questions before a patient sees anyone, down from twenty six. Completion on a phone went from 44 to 81 percent over three months.

A third of patients complete this on their own phone in the waiting room, a third on a clinic tablet, a third with a volunteer typing for them. Three very different situations, one form. The biggest change was not visual. We split the form into what is needed before care and what can be collected after, and it turned out only nine questions were genuinely needed before. Insurance details, employment, most of the history, all of it moved to after the person had been seen. Nobody had ever asked which of those fields blocked care versus which were simply collected out of habit. We also stopped asking for an address as a required field, because a meaningful share of patients do not have one and were abandoning the form at that question rather than lying.
02 Language and access

Two projects where the design problem was mostly a language problem, and where translating the interface was the easy half.

Grievance filing, hotel workers' local

31 fields to 9, twenty minutes to four, in English, Spanish, Cantonese and Tagalog. Filings went up 60 percent in the first quarter, which was the point.

Members were filing on a break with eleven minutes and a phone. Many were not filing at all, which the stewards read as low grievance volume rather than a broken form. Cutting fields was the easy part. The hard part was the vocabulary. The English form used contract language nobody says out loud. We rewrote every question the way stewards actually ask it in the break room, then had that translated by two members per language rather than by an agency, and tested the translations by asking a different member to read the question and say what it was asking for. Three questions failed that test twice. One of them, about the date of the incident, was failing because the form wanted a single date and the incident was ongoing. That was not a translation problem at all.

The twelve form components underneath most of this work, as a Figma file plus plain HTML and CSS. Paid for businesses, free for small worker organisations.

🔗Field Forms Kit, free for worker organisationsmercerfielddesign.com↗
03 How I work

The short version, so you know what you are buying and whether it suits you.

I watch before I draw

No project starts in Figma. It starts with me standing behind somebody doing the task, asking why about forty times, on the device they really use.

Every useful thing I have ever found came from observation, not from a meeting. The dead strip on the cracked screen. The dispatcher's one free hand. The address field that made unhoused patients abandon intake. None of that would have come up in a requirements document, and in every case the people involved knew about it and did not think it was worth mentioning. So I ask for two things before we start: access to two or three people who do the work, and an hour with whoever knows why the current process exists. Then I count taps, and I test on the worst phone in the building. If a client cannot give me access to the people who will use the thing, I turn the job down. That has happened four times and I have never regretted it.

What I charge and who pays what. Free under twenty members, roughly half for locals, clinics and co-ops, standard for funded nonprofits and businesses.

🔗Rates, sliding scale, publishedmercerfielddesign.com↗