When walking through a local park, you will likely see a desire path or two. A small section of grass or garden that has been worn away by people taking shortcuts. Often, a desire path is shockingly close to a concrete footpath; it just wasn't close enough in the minds of many.
Safety technology shares a striking similarity with desire paths in that when poorly designed, it just won't be used, with subcontractors and workers opting for non-compliance as their shortcut.

When people come to us following a failed digital rollout, they often want to know why SignOnSite will be different. How can they know that this time they'll be successful, and the answer is in desire paths.

SignOnSite has been building construction safety software for almost a decade. Over that time, we've had hundreds of thousands of real people interact with our system, often in unique ways we couldn't have imagined. So rather than force our users into an 'ideal' workflow, we allow them to interact with our software in a variety of ways. Thereby making them more likely to use our platform and our customers more compliant.

An example of this is in our Attendance and Induction features. Of course, in an ideal world, you want every worker to complete an induction before they enter your site, but there will always be edge cases where this isn't possible. In these edge cases, you want to ensure that your software still allows those workers to sign on and a record that they aren't currently inducted so that you can rectify this as soon as possible.

Some local councils in Finland wait for the first snowfall after a new park has been installed to see where people have walked and use these as guides on where to place more permanent footpaths. We view our software the same way; we give you a flexible tool that you can match to your natural routines rather than placing impractical rigidity onto your teams.