We rebuilt trade assignment three times. The first two versions were thorough, configurable, and correct. Nobody used them. This is the third version, which works because it asks almost nothing of the person using it.
The 90-second constraint
The brief came from watching supers, not from a feature request. A supervisor moving through a building does not stop to do data entry. They log a defect in the gap between two other things: a contractor waiting, a phone going off, a delivery at the gate. The real budget for assigning a defect to a trade is about 90 seconds, and most of that is walking.
So the question stopped being "what fields should assignment have" and became "what would a super do with 90 seconds and one thumb".
Two taps, no thinking
The answer we landed on is two taps.
- 01Tap the defect's trade. Tiling, painting, electrical, waterproofing.
- 02Tap the contractor.
That is the whole thing. The defect is assigned, the contractor is notified, and the super has already moved on. No form, no stack of modals, no required fields hiding behind a "more options" link.
Everything else assignment could capture is either inferred or pushed to later. The location is already on the defect, from when the photo was taken. The due date comes from the project's workflow rules, not a date picker. The notification to the contractor fires on its own. The detail the office cares about gets added at a desk, by someone who is not standing in a stairwell.
Defaults are a design decision, not a fallback
Most assignment flows are slow because they treat every field as a question you have to answer. We treat every field as a default the system should already know, and an exception you can override when you need to. A contractor's usual trades, a project's close-out window, the standard notification template. None of those are settings buried three menus deep. They are the reason the common case is two taps and the rare case is still there when you want it. The best field is the one that is already right before you touch it.
What we left out on purpose
Every version we rejected had more power and less use. We left out per-assignment priority pickers, free-text instructions at the point of assignment, multi-trade splits, and a dozen other things that sound sensible in a planning doc and die on a wet Tuesday on site.
None of them are actually gone. They live in the defect's full detail view, for when someone has the time and a keyboard. They are just not in the critical path, because the critical path belongs to the person with 90 seconds and one thumb.
That is the two-tap standard. Not fewer features. Fewer decisions, in the one place where decisions are expensive.