We had a roadmap built out of support tickets and GitHub issues. Both are heavily biased: they capture the problems people can articulate, from the people willing to write them down. So we asked a customer if we could stand next to their robots for three weeks and watch.
Nobody scrubs a timeline
We had spent months on timeline interaction. Almost nobody used it the way we designed it.
The actual workflow: a pick fails, an operator flags it, and an engineer opens the recording already knowing roughly when. They do not explore. They jump to a timestamp, step three frames back, step three frames forward, and form a hypothesis. The scrubber is a way to get to a known place, not a way to browse.
What they wanted was a keyboard shortcut for "previous frame where this entity changed." We did not have one. It is in 0.29.
The failure is almost never where the alarm is
A gripper reports a failed grasp at t=12.4. The cause is at t=11.8, when a transform update arrived late and the planner computed against a stale pose. By the time the alarm fires, the interesting moment is six hundred milliseconds in the past and in a different entity.
This is an argument for logging more than you think you need, and it is the argument we had been making badly. We were selling "visualise your data." What people needed to hear was "record the boring streams too, because the failure will be in one of them."
Screens are not where the work happens
The engineers we watched spent a lot of time crouched next to a machine with a laptop balanced on a crate. Our UI assumed a desk, two monitors, and both hands. Panels that require a click-and-drag to resize are hostile in that posture.
We are not going to fix this with a responsive breakpoint. It needs a genuinely different layout mode, and it is now on the roadmap where a feature we had ranked higher used to be.
What we got right
One thing survived contact: entity paths. Every team we watched had converged on a hierarchy that mirrored their physical robot, without being told to. The tree matched how they talked about the machine out loud, which meant navigating it needed no explanation.