03 — Logistics — 2024
Halyard
for Kestrel Freight
Kestrel brokers 900 loads a week. Their dispatchers were faster on the phone than in any software they had been sold, so we stopped competing with the phone and built for the hands that were already flying across a keyboard.
- 00:47
- 92%
- 3.1×
01
Designing for the expert
Consumer software assumes the user is new. Dispatch software has the opposite problem: the user has done this 40,000 times and every affordance built for the novice is friction for them.
Halyard has no onboarding tour. It has a command surface, forty-one bindings, and a legend you can summon and dismiss without leaving the row you are editing. New dispatchers reach proficiency in about nine days, which is slower than the tool it replaced. Experienced dispatchers are three times faster, which is what Kestrel was paying for.
02
Drafts that survive
Dispatchers are interrupted constantly. Every partially-entered load is a CRDT document that syncs across their two monitors and their phone, so an interruption costs a context switch rather than a re-entry.
“They told us the software should feel invisible. It should feel like a good pen.”
Sable
On-device defect detection for a ceramics line, running on a $58 board.