Design for the Person Holding the ReceiptDesign for the Person Holding the Receipt

Halfway through a research session on albert, BAFTA’s carbon toolkit for film and TV, I asked a simple question: who actually knows what happened on set last week? Session after session, the answer was the same. Not the person with the login. The detail lived with the crew, the heads of department, the finance team, and in receipts nobody had time to type up.

That moment changed how I design. A year later, working on Writesea’s writing platform for universities, I ran into the same problem from the other side. Here’s what both projects taught me, and the questions I now ask before I draw a single screen.

The login and the knowledge live in different places

Most enterprise tools are designed for the person who signs in. It feels obvious: that’s who uses the product. But in a lot of organisations, the person who signs in is a coordinator. They’re collecting information that other people have, often weeks after it happened.

On albert, that gap had a cost. The toolkit was hard to navigate, so teams put it off until post-production. By then, most of the actions and evidence were gone. Productions weren’t failing because they didn’t care about sustainability. They were failing because the tool asked the wrong person, at the wrong time, to remember everything.

Design the hand-off, not just the form

Once we saw the gap, the brief changed. The job wasn’t to make a better form for the coordinator. It was to get information from the people who have it, while it’s still fresh. Three design moves did most of the work.

1. Let people assign the work

In the redesigned action plan, any suggested action can be added to the plan, assigned to a named person and given a frequency. That person sees it in their own task list and updates it as they go. The coordinator stops chasing and starts reviewing.

2. Accept the format people already use

Finance teams don’t think in forms, they think in spreadsheets. So we added an import that takes a CSV or Excel file of up to 1,000 rows, with a template to start from, and an editable table for anything that needs fixing afterwards. The evidence already existed. We just stopped making people retype it.

3. Make “roughly right now” better than “perfect later”

Plenty of productions don’t have meter readings for a studio or an office. Instead of a dead end, we offered benchmarks: pick the type of space and log an honest estimate today. Something recorded during production beats nothing recorded at the end.

The share of productions starting their footprint in pre-production, instead of after wrapping, rose from 30% to 55%. That number matters more to me than any screen I designed, because it was the problem the research pointed at.

Writesea: the same lesson from the other side

At Writesea I designed for universities. Career coaches set the standards, students do the writing, and administrators at universities and resellers set everything up. Three groups, three very different jobs, one product.

When we built the template builder, it would have been easy to design for the person configuring it and hand students a blank page with lots of options. Instead, coaches set the structure once, and students start from a template that already reflects what good looks like. Fewer decisions, clearer feedback, less back-and-forth. Launching it shortened time to market and cut the support workload by about half a person’s time.

The admin modules followed the same idea. The people setting up a university aren’t the people using it day to day, so the admin side did the heavy lifting once, and everyone else got a simpler product.

What I’d do differently

I’d map who holds which information on day one, before talking about features. On albert we found the gap through research, which is the right way to find it, but a simple “who knows what, and when” map in the first week would have got us there faster.

The best enterprise tools don’t just serve the person signing in. They quietly connect them to everyone else who makes the work happen. Design for the person holding the receipt, and the person holding the login has a much easier job.