Client notes
What landed after the brief, including the parts that stung.
These are not star ratings. They are remarks from people who commissioned a study, a walkthrough, interviews, or a briefing, and then had to decide what to do with a feature.
They sat with two of our coordinators in the operations room in Shah Alam and watched them ignore the repeating-task field for an entire morning. I had assumed the field was hard to find. It was not. The coordinators already kept repeats in a wall calendar they trusted in front of the whole shift. The brief named that, which annoyed me at first, and then saved us from another round of tutorial screens.
The first-week write-up was shorter than I wanted. I said so in the briefing. Farid pointed at the day-three notes: nobody had opened the shared-tag screen because the shared folder in the old notes app still held the month’s work. Length was not the problem. We had asked the wrong people to switch too early.
I asked them to speak with people who had switched off suggesting mode. The quotes about managers reading every mark as a fight were uncomfortable in a KLCC meeting room. We still needed them. We did not change the colour of the marks. We changed who is in the document when suggesting is on.
The briefing at Batu Caves ran long because our designer and I disagreed about hiding a reminder channel. Amina would not break the tie. She restated what the teachers in the study had done on Sunday night, then waited. We left with one channel removed from the default, not with a morale speech.
They would not give us an “adoption score.” I had asked for one to take to a board pack. What we received instead was a page on each feature and the substitute people already used. The board asked better questions with that than they would have with a percentage.
Two longer accounts
The repeating-task field in a Shah Alam warehouse
A task list used by shift coordinators had shipped repeating tasks with a tutorial. Enablement looked healthy in the first three days. Amina spent two mornings in the operations room and watched coordinators write the same repeats on a wall calendar that the whole shift could see without unlocking a phone. The brief said the field was not hidden; it was competing with a public object. Hafiz Rahman, who owns the list, had asked us to find a “discoverability problem.” We did not find one. The next release hid repeating tasks from the default and left the wall calendar alone. He still tells us the first morning felt wasted. The second morning did not.
Suggesting mode in a Kajang writing group
Daniel Khoo’s document suite had a suggesting mode that people opened and then disabled. Mei Ling interviewed eight writers who had turned it off. Several described a manager who treated every mark as a personal fight. The product group had prepared tooltip copy. The interviews did not support a tooltip. The change that followed was social: suggesting mode stayed, but the manager was no longer in the live document during first drafts. Daniel has said the quotes were uncomfortable in a KLCC room. They were also the only evidence that moved the rule.
If you want a sitting of your own on the record, that is a decision we take with you after the study, not a marketing request we send on day one.