Relay

Relay's users are dispatchers who live in the product for twelve hours at a stretch. That changes the brief completely: nothing can be charming, everything has to be legible at a glance from a metre away, and the interface has to survive being looked at ten thousand times a week.

A system built for density

We built the system around a small set of primitives tuned for scanning: one type scale, three surface levels, and a status vocabulary that reads by shape as well as colour — a real requirement in a room where half the screens are badly calibrated.

Onboarding that teaches the model

New dispatchers previously learned the product by shadowing someone for a week. The rebuilt first run teaches the underlying model — loads, legs, and exceptions — using the operator's own live data rather than a sandbox, so the first real dispatch happens on day one.

The system was the first one our engineers actually wanted to use. Two years on it is still the default.

Where it landed

Time to first dispatch went from several days to a few hours. The system now covers four products and has outlived two rebrands, which is the only durability test that counts.