EZ Sign Story #10: Breaking the “Developer Knows Best” Mindset: How Our Japan–China Engineering Team Overhauled Three OS Apps

When EZ Sign first reached customers, we quickly discovered something we hadn't fully understood during development.

Getting the hardware to work was only part of the challenge.

The real challenge was creating an app that anyone could use easily and confidently.

At the time, EZ Sign was designed to support all three major operating systems: Windows, iOS, and Android.

Supporting three operating systems also meant developing and maintaining applications across three different platforms.

This became the beginning of one of the biggest application improvements in EZ Sign's development history.

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When “It Works” Wasn't Good Enough

Developing the EZ Sign app meant endless cycles of testing, debugging, and improvement.

Every change had to be tested across different smartphones, NFC readers, and operating systems.

As we solved one problem after another, however, something became increasingly clear.

Simply making the system work was not enough. The experience also needed to feel intuitive to the people using it.

I come from a sales background. To me, a manufacturer has a responsibility to deliver products that genuinely satisfy customers—not simply products that technically function.

Then came valuable feedback from customers in Japan and the United States.

We couldn't ignore that feedback.

We had to stop thinking only from a development perspective and start thinking more deeply about the people actually using EZ Sign.

So I made the decision: We needed to put the user experience first and rebuild the app around the needs of our customers.

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“Why Can't We Do That?”

We collected customer feedback and feature requests from Japan and the United States and prioritized them.

One request stood out above everything else:

It sounded simple.

After all, EZ Sign is designed to be updated again and again. If someone created a design yesterday, why shouldn't they be able to simply change the date today?

My first reaction was very much a salesman's reaction:

I pushed the development team for an answer.

What they explained completely changed my understanding of the problem.

Inside the app, text input, image processing, and graphics such as QR codes were handled by completely different software components.

The challenge was to bring all of these elements together while preserving their layers, positions, formatting, and editability.

That meant turning everything into a single project file that could later be opened and edited again.

There were easier workarounds. For example, users could create their designs in software such as Canva and import the finished image into EZ Sign.

Some technically skilled customers had already found ways to do exactly that.

But that wasn't good enough for us.

If customers had to rely on another piece of software just to make EZ Sign easier to use, then we weren't solving the real problem.

So we decided to take on the hardest part head-on.

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Japan and China Join Forces

We identified eleven major improvement items and divided the development work into two phases.

These improvements were released across Windows, Android, and iOS in early February.

At first, our engineering team in Zhuhai, China took the lead.

To accelerate development and bring the improvements to customers as quickly as possible, we expanded the engineering team.

Additional software engineers joined the project in China, while several engineers from Japan were also assigned to the development effort.

It became a true Japan–China engineering effort.

I began receiving weekly reports from our project managers that showed just how hard the teams were pushing to bring the improvements to customers.

The team kept pushing forward.

And by mid-to-late March, we successfully released the major new features across all three platforms.

The features customers had been asking for were finally in their hands.

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For Hardware, Launch Day Is Only the Beginning

The app became dramatically easier to use.

And then we started hearing something we really wanted to hear:

That feedback meant a lot to us.

We could have continued relying on technically skilled users to find their own workarounds.

Instead, we chose to go back into the system itself and improve what needed to be improved.

Because that's what we believe manufacturers should do.

Hardware becomes fixed once it leaves the factory.

Software is different.

Software can continue to evolve long after the product reaches the customer's hands.

We will continue listening to our customers, identifying opportunities for improvement, and enhancing the experience through an ongoing cycle of Plan → Do → Check → Act.

The hardware may be finished when it leaves the factory.

But the product itself is never finished.

This is how we intend to keep EZ Sign moving forward.

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