4 ms·

> I went from searching for the hardest problem I can solve to searching for the simplest problem that will have the most impact. This is a fantastic framework

by tibbar 5y ago

> I went from searching for the hardest problem I can solve to searching for the simplest problem that will have the most impact. This is a fantastic framework to pursue when, for instance, joining a new organization. You can quickly have an outsized impact just by looking for common pain points. As a corollary, it’s very useful to spend lots of time using your own product and talking to the users!

agumonkey 5y ago
this is something I'd pay to be addressed in most companies / institutions. Every tool they buy (physical or digital) is always 60% fit, but adding a few bits on top would propel it above 80% and make everybody's days a bliss. Most applications I've seen are designed for generic tasks, except that workers have a very regular set of tasks, if software could be tailored a bit to this (prefill stuff, save clicks) you cut fatigue and errors buy a huge figure. This can have a serious social impact, last gig there were thousands of lawsuits waiting in a hall because nobody wants to type them in since the software requires to rewrite everything from scratch even if 80% of the data is identical.
- CraigJPerry 5y ago
  This is one advantage of the world switching to webapps over desktop apps. It’s trivial for me to create a chrome extension that enriches or modifies the UI of a bought product. Add an extra menu of common tasks- no problem. Add a datalist dropdown of options to a textbox where the options come from another service dynicamlly? - again no bother but usability of the vendor product went up substantially.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Potentially only, where i work, browsers are managed by IT, no way to patch stuff, no devtools. Also depending on the design, adding your code may never work unless you reverse the whole codebase (the app in place is extremely stateful, all a.href are replaced by procedural js calls). Don't laugh but I had more results scripting mouse/keyboard automation on 90s oracle GUIs [0] than the app I mentioned above. [0] I could prefill half the stuff and help the rest with powershell, it gave me 70% time reduction on most tasks
    - CraigJPerry 5y ago
      Ahh that sucks royally. I've been in similar and it's soul sucking! <flippant-comment-from-a-random-hn-poster-who-doesnt-know-your-circumstances> The job market's great right now </flippant-comment-from-a-random-hn-poster-who-doesnt-know-your-circumstances> :-) Hopefully more usefully as a comment - browsers are super hackable, you might be able to use a javascript bookmarklet to effect some improvements. Something like this https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ (there are others) makes life easier for creating these.
      - agumonkey 5y ago
        I don't mind the comment above, he's somehow right that html/js is more open to ad-hoc patches than native code. Except when admins forbid you to. bookmarklets don't allow for injections into the app so it wont work
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    I'd be interested in seeing implementation examples of adding 3rd party data from one (3rd party) web source to another for form completion, if you have them please? Presumably this has to hack around cross-site restrictions nowadays (it's a couple of years since I did any website JavaScript).
    - plorntus 5y ago
      Extensions can request a higher level of permisions so you typically wont run into that issue.
    - CraigJPerry 5y ago
      Here's one i made just now: https://gist.github.com/craigjperry2/83b81b7eaf5cf68ca042a9a0c638a00e https://gist.github.com/craigjperry2/83b81b7eaf5cf68ca042a9a... 1. Clone that repo 2. Run my fake vendor app - in this case an html page with an empty text box - npx http-server 3. Add the browser extension - tested in firefox - then refresh the page Now you should see the title fields from https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts in a dropdown that's now been added to the input field of the fake vendor app page.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    This is an advantage of open-source (as in source that you can read and modify, not necessarily FOSS), not web, IMO. Webapps are just necessarily open-source (at least the client-side portion).
    - CraigJPerry 5y ago
      Yeah i suppose, if everyone switched to rendering on a canvas element instead of to the DOM then this advantage would shrink away
peterburkimsher 5y ago
Yes, and it's surprisingly easy to find out where to help! The best colleagues and best teams are where there are a lot of "thank you"s. The same is true in the article: "I am indebted in particular to one woman, whose name I will never know". "I also thank the Excel product team for shipping this technology without which this work wouldn’t be as famous." I wish I knew how to reach out to the author (Sumit Gulwani) or other people in the Excel product team, about a feature that would be really hard to code but really useful to me. Hierarchical menus of Sheets. Like bookmarks folders, or Playlist Folders in iTunes, clicking on the Sheet Folder would show every row inside, concatenated into a giant Sheet. Clicking on the Sheet Folder would bring up a menu, which I could then navigate to find a sub-sheet. From a programming perspective I know that it's really hard to do hierarchical nested databases. But from a usability perspective, it would make some of our Excel documents with hundreds of Sheets much easier to navigate.
- mshariff 5y ago
  Do you mean like an index sheet with links so you can then go to the specific page? We might have something for you…
  - peterburkimsher 5y ago
    An index sheet would be a good start! Being able to organise it into a hierarchy, like a file system, with folders and subfolders, is what I'm imagining. Selecting a Sheet Folder would show the concatenated data from all sub-sheets, like iTunes Playlist Folders. Something like this: http://peterburk.free.fr/ExcelSheetMenus.png http://peterburk.free.fr/ExcelSheetMenus.png

by tibbar 5y ago

agumonkey 5y ago

this is something I'd pay to be addressed in most companies / institutions. Every tool they buy (physical or digital) is always 60% fit, but adding a few bits on top would propel it above 80% and make everybody's days a bliss. Most applications I've seen are designed for generic tasks, except that workers have a very regular set of tasks, if software could be tailored a bit to this (prefill stuff, save clicks) you cut fatigue and errors buy a huge figure. This can have a serious social impact, last gig there were thousands of lawsuits waiting in a hall because nobody wants to type them in since the software requires to rewrite everything from scratch even if 80% of the data is identical.

CraigJPerry 5y ago
This is one advantage of the world switching to webapps over desktop apps. It’s trivial for me to create a chrome extension that enriches or modifies the UI of a bought product. Add an extra menu of common tasks- no problem. Add a datalist dropdown of options to a textbox where the options come from another service dynicamlly? - again no bother but usability of the vendor product went up substantially.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Potentially only, where i work, browsers are managed by IT, no way to patch stuff, no devtools. Also depending on the design, adding your code may never work unless you reverse the whole codebase (the app in place is extremely stateful, all a.href are replaced by procedural js calls). Don't laugh but I had more results scripting mouse/keyboard automation on 90s oracle GUIs [0] than the app I mentioned above. [0] I could prefill half the stuff and help the rest with powershell, it gave me 70% time reduction on most tasks
  - CraigJPerry 5y ago
    Ahh that sucks royally. I've been in similar and it's soul sucking! <flippant-comment-from-a-random-hn-poster-who-doesnt-know-your-circumstances> The job market's great right now </flippant-comment-from-a-random-hn-poster-who-doesnt-know-your-circumstances> :-) Hopefully more usefully as a comment - browsers are super hackable, you might be able to use a javascript bookmarklet to effect some improvements. Something like this https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ (there are others) makes life easier for creating these.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      I don't mind the comment above, he's somehow right that html/js is more open to ad-hoc patches than native code. Except when admins forbid you to. bookmarklets don't allow for injections into the app so it wont work
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  I'd be interested in seeing implementation examples of adding 3rd party data from one (3rd party) web source to another for form completion, if you have them please? Presumably this has to hack around cross-site restrictions nowadays (it's a couple of years since I did any website JavaScript).
  - plorntus 5y ago
    Extensions can request a higher level of permisions so you typically wont run into that issue.
  - CraigJPerry 5y ago
    Here's one i made just now: https://gist.github.com/craigjperry2/83b81b7eaf5cf68ca042a9a0c638a00e https://gist.github.com/craigjperry2/83b81b7eaf5cf68ca042a9a... 1. Clone that repo 2. Run my fake vendor app - in this case an html page with an empty text box - npx http-server 3. Add the browser extension - tested in firefox - then refresh the page Now you should see the title fields from https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts in a dropdown that's now been added to the input field of the fake vendor app page.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  This is an advantage of open-source (as in source that you can read and modify, not necessarily FOSS), not web, IMO. Webapps are just necessarily open-source (at least the client-side portion).
  - CraigJPerry 5y ago
    Yeah i suppose, if everyone switched to rendering on a canvas element instead of to the DOM then this advantage would shrink away

peterburkimsher 5y ago

Yes, and it's surprisingly easy to find out where to help! The best colleagues and best teams are where there are a lot of "thank you"s. The same is true in the article: "I am indebted in particular to one woman, whose name I will never know". "I also thank the Excel product team for shipping this technology without which this work wouldn’t be as famous." I wish I knew how to reach out to the author (Sumit Gulwani) or other people in the Excel product team, about a feature that would be really hard to code but really useful to me. Hierarchical menus of Sheets. Like bookmarks folders, or Playlist Folders in iTunes, clicking on the Sheet Folder would show every row inside, concatenated into a giant Sheet. Clicking on the Sheet Folder would bring up a menu, which I could then navigate to find a sub-sheet. From a programming perspective I know that it's really hard to do hierarchical nested databases. But from a usability perspective, it would make some of our Excel documents with hundreds of Sheets much easier to navigate.

mshariff 5y ago
Do you mean like an index sheet with links so you can then go to the specific page? We might have something for you…
- peterburkimsher 5y ago
  An index sheet would be a good start! Being able to organise it into a hierarchy, like a file system, with folders and subfolders, is what I'm imagining. Selecting a Sheet Folder would show the concatenated data from all sub-sheets, like iTunes Playlist Folders. Something like this: http://peterburk.free.fr/ExcelSheetMenus.png http://peterburk.free.fr/ExcelSheetMenus.png