30 Minutes to Get Through. Hours to Register Later.

Context

During peak season, large farms in Egypt can hire up to 1,000 workers a day.

The team I worked with had built a mobile app to register workers, track their work, and monitor performance. New workers were registered at the farm gate and given a physical ID printed on the spot. Supervisors then used those IDs to identify workers, assign teams, and track their work.

The system worked, but supervisors kept saying registration was slowing them down.

We initially thought it was resistance to new technology.

So I went to a farm and experienced the process myself.

The Constraint

A farm needed to get everyone through the gate within 30 minutes.

During peak season:

300

new workers needed registration each day

~2 min

for each registration

2

printers available at the gate

300 workers × 2 minutes

= 600 minutes of registration work

600 minutes ÷ 2 printers

= 5 hours

5 hours of work was being forced into a 30-minute window.

The process could not meet the farm's operating window.

Adding more printers or significantly increasing gate staff would increase cost and require resources the farm did not have.

Discovery

I spent two days interviewing supervisors and observing the entire worker journey.

One supervisor challenged me to use the app during morning check-in. That made the bottleneck obvious: the gate was the most constrained part of the entire workflow.

Finding 01

Workers arrived through contractors.

The workforce could change every day depending on which farm was paying more, so farms could not reliably know who would show up in advance.

Finding 02

The constraint changed after workers entered the farm.

Workers were divided into teams of around 30, and supervisors had almost the entire day with them.

Finding 03

The work was concentrated in the wrong place.

The gate had 30 minutes. Supervisors had hours.

What looked like a technology adoption problem was actually a workflow problem.

The Real Problem

We were trying to complete all registration at the gate in 30 minutes, even though the supervisors managing those workers had hours available later.

The problem wasn't registration. It was where registration happened.

At the gate

  • 30 minutes
  • High volume
  • Limited space
  • Limited staff
  • Limited printers

Inside the farm

  • Several hours
  • Workers already grouped into teams
  • Supervisors already working with them

The design opportunity was to separate worker identification from full registration.

Reframing the Workflow

Before

Worker arrivesFull registrationID printedWorker enters

All within 30 minutes.

After

Worker arrivesTemporary identificationWorker entersSupervisor registers worker during the dayOfficial ID printed later

Instead of making the gate faster, I moved the work to a part of the journey where there was enough time to complete it.

Solution

Temporary QR tickets separated entry from full registration.

At the gate, employees counted new workers, selected their contractor, and printed the required number of temporary QR tickets.

Contractors distributed the tickets to the workers.

Once inside, supervisors scanned the QR tickets alongside the existing worker IDs and continued working with their teams.

Instead of completing registration at the gate, supervisors registered new workers' information throughout the day while they were already working with them.

At the end of the day, the gate team generated and printed the workers' official IDs.

Recording of the temporary ticket flow

The farm still got the worker data and official IDs it needed. The difference was that registration was no longer concentrated in a 30-minute window.

How the New Workflow Worked

  1. 01Count

    Gate employees count new workers.

  2. 02Print

    Temporary QR tickets are printed based on the number of new workers.

  3. 03Distribute

    Contractors distribute the tickets to workers.

  4. 04Scan

    Supervisors scan the QR tickets once workers are inside.

  5. 05Register

    Supervisors complete worker registration throughout the day.

  6. 06Print ID

    The gate team generates and prints official worker IDs.

The same information was collected. The same identification outcome was achieved. The workload was simply distributed across the worker journey.

Why This Worked

The solution did not require more printers, more gate staff, or a faster registration interface.

It changed the timing of the work.

The gate was optimized for speed and identification.

The farm became the place for detailed registration.

This matched the actual availability of people, time, and space.

  • •No additional printers
  • •No additional gate staff
  • •No need to complete registration during the 30-minute peak window

Impact

We did not add more printers or staff.

We moved the work to where there was actually enough time to do it.

After I brought the findings back to the team, we implemented the solution immediately.

The UI itself was simple, but it removed the reason supervisors were resisting the product.

Farms continued using the feature every day, with more workers properly registered than before and no more technical resistance.

We solved a technology adoption problem without changing the technology. We changed the workflow around it.

The solution was implemented before grape season, when the farms would need the workflow to operate at full scale.

What I Learned

The biggest lesson was that adoption problems are not always product problems.

When users resist a workflow, the first question should not always be:

“How do we make the interface easier?”

Sometimes the better question is:

“Are we asking people to do the right work at the right time and place?”

In this case, the interface was not the main problem.

The workflow was.

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