Building a Digital Product from the Field

The prototype could transmit information in three actions. Nora Bensaïd had tested it on several phones, with a slow connection and incomplete data.

Yet at the health centre, the coordinating nurse cannot find the third action.

She is holding a tablet, answering a colleague in the corridor and looking for the next record. The button is visible. The moment to look at it is not.

Nora closes her computer and asks to repeat the sequence from the beginning.

The project, called Relais, is intended to help several practices share the necessary information between two visits. The brief talks about a form, a status and a notification.

In the field, Nora discovers work made up of temporary notes, deferred decisions and information that cannot all be handled with the same urgency.

Another notification would not reduce the noise. It would move it elsewhere.

‘Nora did not ask us which feature we wanted. She asked which mistake we were trying to prevent.’

Sophie Martin, coordinating nurse

Nora conducts interviews in Dovetail and connects every observation to the precise moment when it appears. She does not create a feature for every irritation.

She distinguishes structural constraints, local habits and workarounds that reveal a genuine gap in the system. This distinction prevents the team from digitising problems that should be solved differently.

Each tool preserves a different trace of the product. None replaces conversation with the people concerned.

Nora removes free-form comments, complex tables and several status levels. Relais keeps three actions: flag, accept and hand over.

Details remain available, but the next decision appears before the history. The product no longer asks the coordinator to reconstruct the priority every time she opens it.

‘We did not make the work simpler. We made visible what had to be decided now.’

Nora Bensaïd

Claude helps Nora compare reports, identify contradictions and prepare test scenarios. It never automatically summarises a clinical situation and presents it as truth.

Suggestions are used during design, with human review. Inside the product, every sensitive piece of information retains its author, time and context.

Nora prefers a clear absence to a plausible answer.

PostHog tracks the time needed to complete a handoff and where the journey is abandoned. Sentry connects errors to the technical conditions that cause them.

Nora does not measure the individual speed of healthcare workers. She measures the product’s ability to return information at the right moment.

When the abandonment rate falls, she returns to the field. A statistical improvement can also mean that people have found a new workaround.

Relais is deployed in three practices. Every week, Nora reviews incidents, requests and observations with Sophie. Some changes enter Linear. Others become a procedure change or a short training session.

Code is only part of the answer.

‘Nora delivered a tool, but above all a way to keep questioning it without starting again from scratch.’

Sophie Martin

Nora keeps one rule for future projects: the more consequences a digital decision creates in the real world, the closer its design must remain to those who bear them.

The stack accelerates research, prototyping, development and observation. It does not replace the judgement that connects those stages.

The product becomes dependable when that continuity remains visible.

Discover a field-centred product stack in ToolTrim →