The constraint that set the brief

First week consulting at ClearCompany. I came in to look at the user experience of their talent platform, and the most useful thing I learned had nothing to do with the interface.

The product needs IIS. That is a Microsoft web server. It does not run on a Mac, and it does not run on Linux either, which I checked mostly out of hope.

I asked how the designers work. They work in Figma, and when they need to see something real, they ask an engineer to screen-share.

I have led design teams through versions of this before, at different companies and different sizes, and the pattern is always the same. Nobody is doing anything wrong. A capable team builds good software under the constraint for years and stops noticing it. The cost does not show up as a failure. It shows up as a slow, permanent tax on the things that can only be observed in a running product.

Which is a precise list: keyboard order. Screen reader output. What a page does at 375 pixels wide, on a phone, on a weak signal — which is how a large share of our users do their onboarding, mid-shift, standing up.

If the people responsible for the quality of the interface cannot run the interface, those things cannot be checked by the people most likely to care. They can only be discovered later, by someone else, as a finding.

So I am not going to treat this as an infrastructure problem to be escalated. It is a design brief, and it is the clearest one I have been handed in twenty years: get something runnable into the hands of the people making the decisions, as early as possible, so feedback arrives while the answer is still cheap to change.

Here is what I intend to be true two years from now. Every designer and product manager here will be able to open the thing they are designing, on their own machine, on the day they design it. The accessibility questions that currently become tickets will be answered before anyone writes one, because the person asking will already have the answer in front of them.

I have built that before. I know what it takes and roughly how long it lasts. Starting Monday.