Designing ERP Screens Your Warehouse Team Won't Hate

Field research, big touch targets and offline-first forms — UX lessons from the loading dock.

Warehouse software is designed in offices and used in environments the designer has usually never stood in. That gap accounts for most adoption failure.

The physical constraints are real and non-negotiable. Users are wearing gloves, so touch targets need to be substantially larger than any design system default. They are often holding something, so single-handed operation is a requirement rather than a nicety.

Lighting varies from floodlit to dim, which rules out low-contrast greys entirely. Connectivity drops between racking aisles, so every form must be offline-first with an explicit, visible sync state — silent local persistence is worse than no persistence, because it destroys trust the first time it appears to lose work.

The most valuable research method is standing on the floor for a shift. Every meaningful improvement we have shipped in this category came from watching someone work around the existing system, not from a requirements document.

Measure adoption by workaround count. When the laminated cheat sheets and the parallel paper log disappear, the interface is working.