The language matters
In consumer tech, we design for "users." The word carries assumptions: someone browsing, choosing, clicking at their leisure. Someone who can close the tab and walk away.
In defense, I design for operators. The distinction is not semantic. It is fundamental.
An operator is someone who:
- Cannot walk away from the task
- Works under time pressure that is externally imposed
- Bears real consequences for mistakes
- Often operates in degraded conditions — fatigue, stress, incomplete information
If you apply consumer UX patterns to this context, you will build something that looks modern and fails catastrophically.
Where consumer patterns break
Progressive disclosure — the darling of consumer UX — can be dangerous in operational contexts. Hiding information behind clicks means an operator must remember what is hidden and where. Under stress, they will not.
Minimalism taken too far strips away the contextual information operators need to maintain situational awareness. A clean interface is not the same as an effective one.
Onboarding flows and tooltips assume a user who is encountering the system for the first time at their own pace. Operators train on systems extensively. They need depth and efficiency, not hand-holding.
What operator-centered design looks like
Over the past years, I have developed a few principles that guide how we think about design at Helsing:
- Default to visible. Information density is not a bug. The right information, structured well, is an asset. Do not hide things to look clean.
- Design for the second thousand hours, not the first. Optimize for experts. Novice-friendly is a training problem, not an interface problem.
- Support interruption and resumption. Operators get pulled away. They switch contexts. The system must make it trivial to understand "where was I?" at a glance.
- Make state unambiguous. In a consumer app, an ambiguous state is a minor annoyance. In an operational system, it is a crisis. Every element must communicate clearly whether something is active, pending, confirmed, or failed.
The goal is not delight. The goal is confidence.
A different kind of empathy
Designing for operators requires a deeper form of empathy. You must understand not just what they do, but what they fear. What keeps them up at night. What failure looks like in their world — not a churned subscription, but a mission that goes wrong.
This is harder than consumer design. It is also more meaningful.