Record yourself doing the job, with the sound on

A client recorded her screen while she did one of the repetitive jobs she wanted rid of, start to finish, and sent me the file. The first version had no sound, so a few days later she walked me through it live instead, talking as she clicked. Those two recordings told me more than any written brief I've been sent, and they changed what I put in front of her.

What the recording showed that the description didn't

In writing, the job was one line: equipment details get copied from one platform into another. Fine. That sentence could describe twenty minutes of work a month or two days a week, and you can't build from it.

Watching it, the job is this. Serial numbers come off a supplier's delivery note. She searches one platform by serial, and up come the specifications and a certificate. Then she goes into the second system, finds the job, creates the item, picks a category from a dropdown, types in the serial, the location, the safe working load and the length, starts typing the manufacturer and lets it auto-complete, uploads the certificate, saves.

Two of those steps are judgment. Choosing the right category, and deciding what to do when the incoming record is missing something. Everything else is typing. You cannot work out which is which from a sentence, and the difference between them is most of the design.

It changed what I proposed

I'd gone into that call expecting to suggest browser automation, software driving the screens the way a person does. It works, and it breaks every time somebody moves a button.

Watching the real thing, most of it could be done with a scheduled export out of one side, an import into the other, and a small piece in the middle that compares the two, maps the fields across and flags anything that looks wrong for a human to check before it saves. Browser automation only for the certificate files, because those don't travel any other way. Smaller to build, far less fragile, and cheaper to keep running for years.

I only knew that was possible because I watched her use the parts of the system I'd never have asked about.

If you're about to pay somebody to automate something

• Record one full run of the real job, on real data, with the sound on and the person talking through what they're doing and why
• Include an awkward record, not just a clean one. The exceptions are where the cost lives
• Don't tidy the process up first. I need to see it as it is, badly named fields and all
• Send it before the quote rather than after, because afterwards the same information arrives as a change request

It also answers a question people find awkward to ask out loud, which is whether the job is worth automating at all. Her volume today is about thirty items a month, which on its own would be hard to justify. It's the contract behind it that makes the case, and that only came up because we were both looking at the same screen and I could ask what happens when this gets busy.

Why I keep asking for this

Most people describe their work as they think it ought to be done, rather than how they do it on a Tuesday afternoon with the phone going. Nobody's being dishonest about that. It's just what happens when you've done something a thousand times, and the steps you've automated in your own head are exactly the ones a developer needs written down.

Ten minutes of screen recording buys a more accurate quote than an hour of meetings, and if I had to choose between the two I'd take the recording.