The software that runs the world looks terrible
Think about the apps you use every day. WhatsApp, Swiggy, Google Pay — these are beautifully designed, smooth, and easy to learn in minutes. Now think about the software that runs farms, factories, power grids, and water systems. It looks like it was built in 2003 and never touched again. The reason? For decades, industrial software was sold on features, not experience. Nobody cared about UX because the buyer was a procurement officer, not the actual user.
This is changing. The people actually using industrial software today grew up with smartphones and well-designed apps. They have higher expectations. They see no reason why the tool that manages a million-dollar irrigation system should be harder to use than ordering food on Zomato. And they are right.
For designers, this is a massive opportunity. Consumer apps have reached peak design — there are 50 meditation apps with identical UI patterns. But industrial software? Most of it has never been touched by a designer. The impact you can make is enormous, and very few designers are paying attention to this space.
Industrial users are not different users — they just have harder jobs
There is a myth that industrial users do not care about good design because they are 'power users.' This is nonsense. A field technician working in 40-degree heat, wearing gloves, looking at a tablet screen in direct sunlight — that person needs good design more than anyone. They cannot afford to squint at a tiny icon or hunt through nested menus. A bad UI for them is not just annoying — it wastes time and could lead to costly errors.
When I designed the Field Layout Tool for irrigation planners, I spent two days just watching them work. They were dragging GPS pins on a satellite map, calculating pipe lengths, checking elevation data — all on a tablet bouncing in a moving truck. If I had designed that from an air-conditioned office without seeing their reality, the app would have failed immediately.
The lesson is simple: industrial design is not about making things look nice. It is about removing every possible friction from a workflow that is already hard. Big tap targets. High contrast. Minimal steps. Clear feedback. These are not luxury features — they are safety features.
Simple wins in complex domains
When I first opened the legacy irrigation app at Valmont, I needed 15 minutes just to find the log-out button. Not joking. The engineers who built it were brilliant — the math behind the pump calculations was flawless. But the interface was built by engineers, for engineers. Nobody stopped to ask: what does the field operator actually need to see first?
The most impactful changes we made were embarrassingly simple. We moved the most-used actions to a top-level navigation bar instead of burying them in a hamburger menu. We replaced a wall of text with a visual status dashboard. We added a progress indicator to a seven-step form that previously gave zero feedback. Each change took very little design effort but saved hours of user frustration per week.
In complex domains, do not try to simplify the complexity itself — that is the wrong target. The domain is complex for a reason. Your job is to simplify how users navigate that complexity. Give them clarity. Give them confidence. Give them fewer clicks.
The stigma problem
Many designers avoid industrial and B2B work because it lacks the glamour of consumer design. You cannot post a data table on Dribbble and get a thousand likes. There are no sleek onboarding animations. The colour palette is often dictated by existing brand guidelines that are ten years old.
But here is what industrial design does give you: real impact. When you redesign a tool that a hundred engineers use every single day, you are saving hundreds of hours per week. That is not hypothetical — you can measure it. For the Valmont redesign, we reduced average task completion time by almost 40%. Forty percent. No meditation app can claim that kind of ROI.
If you are a designer who wants your work to matter in ways you can actually measure, industrial software is one of the best places to be. It is not glamorous. But it is meaningful.