Before we designed Ghaf Markets’ stock app, four of us worked a week of shifts in four stores in Dubai and Sharjah. We stacked deliveries, scanned shelves and reordered stock with the tools staff used every day. It’s now how we start every product engagement.
What you only learn by doing the job
Interviews tell you what people think they do. Shifts show you what they actually do. In one week we learned things no workshop would have told us.
- Staff hold a box or a cage handle in one hand almost all the time, so the app had to work one-handed.
- The back of the store, where the reordering happens, has no phone signal.
- Gaps are checked in a rush before the morning delivery, so every second per scan counts.
- The paper list wasn’t a failure of discipline. It was faster than the scanner.
How it changed the product
The brief we wrote after that week was four lines long: one hand, one scan, under two seconds, works offline. Every design decision after that was tested against it. The app reached ten pilot stores in eight weeks, and staff rated it 4.7 out of 5.
The best research method we know is to be bad at someone else’s job for a week.
How to do it well
Ask the store or depot manager first, and give them a say in when you come. Do real work, not observation from a corner. Write notes at the end of every shift, not the end of the week. And go back: we visited the pilot stores every week during the first two months.
It costs about a week of a small team’s time. We’ve never found a better way to spend it.
