Designing workflow tools for the people who actually use them

Enterprise software has a long history of being "powerful" and unused. When internal tools are hard to navigate, people route around them — back to email, back to DMs, back to the chaos you were trying to fix. The best workflow system on the market can't help if nobody submits through it.

Adoption is a UX problem first.

Most people aren't power users

Your average employee might touch your intake system once a month, or once a year. They're not going to read documentation. They're not going to learn a query language. They need to walk up, understand the form in a few seconds, submit, and get on with their day.

That implies a few constraints:

• Plain language. No acronyms only the ops team recognizes. If a field is called "Cost center," explain what to put in it.
• Progressive disclosure. Don't show all 30 fields at once. Reveal them as choices narrow.
• Obvious next steps. It should be clear what happens after submit, and how the requester will be notified.

Reduce submission fatigue

Every form is an interruption in someone's real job. Respect that.

• Ask for the minimum. If your auth system knows who they are, don't ask for their email, department, or manager. Pre-fill it.
• Use AI to draft. Let people describe the request in their own words and have the system extract fields. They correct what's wrong instead of filling a blank page.
• Save drafts. People get interrupted. Losing their progress is a guaranteed way to get a frustrated email instead of a clean submission.

Design for the phone

A lot of approvals happen from a phone — between meetings, from a cab, at an offsite. If your approval screen requires a desktop to be usable, you've built in latency. Big tap targets, clear actions, no tiny dropdowns.

The test

If a first-time user can submit a request in under two minutes without asking anyone for help, your design is working. If they can't, no amount of backend automation will save you.

Explore templates for examples built with these principles, or start free to adapt them to your team.