Site records shouldn't take an hour at the end of every shift

16 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, William Doyle MRICS recounts the early development of the Rail Diary platform, describing how his meeting with CTO Paul—who ran the digital agency Gather Digital—taught him that on‑site data entry should not rely on spreadsheet‑style tables. Instead, the system must provide a structured workflow that makes it easy for field workers (illustrated by the ‘person in orange in the pouring rain’) to capture accurate data quickly and correctly. The speaker emphasizes that a well‑designed, user‑centric interface is essential to avoid time‑consuming, error‑prone data entry on construction sites.

So when I started Rail Diary as it was, and I met Paul, who's our CTO and ran a digital agency called Gather Digital at the time, the first thing I learned was the best way to enter data is not in a table. That's not how you enter data. That's how you interpret it or read it. But when you're asking someone to capture data on site, it's not just about going, take this fancy spreadsheet that QS has built and put it on an iPad or put it on a tablet. It's about giving it structured workflow and making it easy for that person in orange in the pouring rain to capture that data correctly.