Designing for frozen hands: an interface for the cold rooms at El Dorado

The users I was designing for wear gloves, stand in near-zero temperatures, and work in a corner of the airport most travelers never see. They move export flowers through cold rooms, and updating inspection results was taking so long that the flowers — and the people — were paying for every extra minute.

This project taught me that the best research is sometimes just standing where your user stands until the constraints become obvious. Gloved fingers rule out small tap targets. Unreliable connectivity rules out any architecture that assumes a round trip per action. Cold rules out anything that takes more than a few seconds of exposed hands.

So the decisions made themselves: layouts with generous touch areas, an offline-tolerant architecture that queues updates and syncs when the network reappears, and flows tested on unreliable connections. I prototyped fast and put the prototypes in front of real operators, because no initial design of mine has ever survived contact with reality — and these certainly didn't.

The result was a workflow that got faster by about a third. But the lesson I keep is smaller and more portable: before you design a screen, find out what the room is like. The room always wins.