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Yes! And, the killer feature of paper that no digital UI has yet to fully capture is the margin. If your business process doesn't have a form field for some da

Yes! And, the killer feature of paper that no digital UI has yet to fully capture is the margin. If your business process doesn't have a form field for some data, but the person on the ground understands that it's valuable, it's naturally scribbled onto the margins, and then worked into the next version of the form. If you're using nearly any digital UI, the feedback loop (if it exists at all) is a side channel. More businesses should just use paper.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
If PDF editing tools were a little better and the average users' file name habits weren't ghoulish we could have digital paper.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  What naming habits would you like to see the average user adopt?
  - doubled112 3y ago
    If I never see people prepending and appending seemingly random versions again, I'd be thrilled. draft_document.pdf document.pdf final_document.pdf final_final_document.pdf document_final.pdf document_v2.pdf final_final_document_v3.pdf Which one do I use?
    - thechao 3y ago
      This is why naively surfacing file systems to users is such a mistake. My gut feeling says that documents should always contain all of their revisions — with a time slider, and marginalia always enabled. However, organization of the documents seems like a critical issue. I can tell you, from my wife's/kiddos desktops, that organization means "one big pile". I strongly suspect that "one big pile" is the right answer, no matter how much it pains my programmer's heart.
      - doubled112 3y ago
        Is it any different than real life? Some people organize their entire lives into boxes and containers and labelled drawers. Some people have, basically, a big pile that they just shuffle through when they need something. For example, I prefer a backpack that's one or two large compartments. Yet they sell backpacks with dozens of little slots. That's too much for me, but somebody thought people wanted it, so somebody must. Over organization doesn't work for me.
      - layer8 3y ago
        The old Word document format (*.doc) could, by accident, contain older versions of the document, as a side effect of how editing operations worked on the internal data structures (not purging all deleted content right away, to optimize editing speed, or something along those lines). This made for some embarrassing cases when third parties received documents with hidden content they weren’t supposed to know about. And we all know of the numerous cases where text was blacked out in PDFs by adding black rectangles on top of it, but the text was still contained in the document.
      - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
        The reason one big pile is the answer, at least for me, is that to do otherwise would be to bog myself down in minutiae of taxonomy. Being hierarchical worked when I was still in school (and somewhat works for work), but one large bucket with the ability to search by content—think iPhoto letting you search for text in photos—is how I run things now.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      I think this is in big part because we got save functionality wrong. The interaction you typically need is to save a snapshot into a different file, and continue to work on the current one. That is, the operation: File -> Save As "file-snapshot.doc" (you're now editing file-snapshot.doc) File -> Open "file.doc" Should've been a single operation: File -> Save current as copy "file-snapshot.doc" (you continue to edit file.doc) The software could even prepend the current date/time to the snapshot name by default, or something. Then, the simplest way of working would always keep "file.doc" as the most recent version, removing the need for the "_v2_final_really_final_final_final" suffixes.
      - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
        While there is software with similar functionality, it is not universal enough for people to expect it to be there and make using it a habit.
  - benhurmarcel 3y ago
    yyyy-mm-dd ReferenceIfAny Project NameOfDocument v1.pdf
    - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
      So for a flat structure where filenames are sorted by time of creation?
- groby_b 3y ago
  Yeah, I too wanted to have paper that runs its own JS interpreter. (Yes, PDFs can embed executable code, because why not)
hcarvalhoalves 3y ago
> More businesses should just use paper. … or rather, digital processes shouldn’t throw away the benefits of paper. E.g.: document databases instead of fixed-schema tabular (paper can accept more data than was anticipated), append-only databases instead of update-in-place (paper doesn’t forget). I’m a big fan of Datomic and similar databases because of that.
- ozim 3y ago
  Problem is when businesses people want statistics and insights. Unstructured data allows not filling in some data but then data might be required to make analysis. Agent taking free form notes might skip parts that are required for other means than job at hand and agent will optimize for work he thinks is important, some general statistics don’t bother him. Problem is that user on the ground sometimes has to be forced into a scheme of bigger picture of processes. On the other hand too much data is also being marked as required by business - where ad hoc note would do. I see this with our customers where they ask us to implement bunch of fields as “must be filled in” just to start complaining that it takes too long to fill all required in - I did not make all of it mandatory on my own it was their business analysis.
skybrian 3y ago
Why can’t this be done with a textarea for notes? Any chat system or ticket system has this.
- timeagain 3y ago
  Working for a company that has mixed paper/electronic documentation. I can’t overstate how useful it is to highlight, circle, and/or cross-out sections of a form. Also to see /what/ was crossed out to know the history of the document. You might say, “well we can add these formatting features and make the form elements removable and…”. But if you know you know. Asking “normal people” to do all this in markup is an insta-fail. Most of us are caterers, not programmers.
  - coding123 3y ago
    AI can handle the mixed form... Perhaps now with LLMs we can just scan all the stuff with crossed out words and cicled conditions and have the ai make it searchable. Then again we should always ask ourselves if a drug dealer would ever recommend someone stop doing drugs.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      LLMs certainly can cope with disordered notes scribbled into the metaphorical margins, and OCR can usually turn literal scribbles in literal margins into something approximating what was written, buuuuuuuuut the AI we currently have is just good enough to be dangerous if you tried using it this way. On the other hand, the last 15 months have been "if you don't like the state of the art AI, wait a week", so I may be out of date with that assessment.
- throwway120385 3y ago
  Discoverability. I can't count the number of times I've had to ask phone support people to please read the notes that the last agent took. If you have a paper form, someone marking in the margins is immediately apparent. Hypermedia didn't go far enough, in the sense that it overlooks how people form relationships with specific documents. In case of margin notes, individuals take an instance of a document template and mark it up to customize it. They recognized that the shape of the form was not the only shape the document could take and they knew that the form was an extension of their authority. So if it didn't make sense they changed it. You can't really reproduce that experience with hypertext because there's no concept of "this document doesn't apply to this situation let me, the individual user, change it to communicate something unique." And because humans aren't reviewing any of these documents, there's nobody there to interpret it correctly even if you could. Essentially the Internet and web form design and replacement of humans with machines has involved a great abdication of authority from the front-line employees who process these forms. I would argue that it's becoming the downfall of our modern society. If a programmer or analyst couldn't envision your situation, nobody works at the company who can do anything about it.
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
> And, the killer feature of paper that no digital UI has yet to fully capture is the margin. This is THE reason why, in the year of our LORD 2024, physicians still HATE electronic medical records. Margins, sticky notes, and red ink you can circle anywhere you d~~n well please, not organized data easily parsed during discovery.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  It's not 1:1, but from observing some math professors, tablets with a stylus are a partial solution to this.
  - shuntress 3y ago
    Whether or not it is literally hand written is not important. The thing that matters is that it is unstructured.
    - naasking 3y ago
      You can support a structured way to add unstructured data. This can be useful a s a stopgap to understand where the structured data is inadequate, but I can become a hindrance if they don't use the structured data all.
      - RheingoldRiver 3y ago
        This is precisely what MediaWiki tries to do, and it's why I love this software more than anything. You have templates and forms that the user can fill out, but the page is really a piece of paper - outside of the template you can write anything you want at all. With Cargo or Semantic MediaWiki you can even make a database out of the structured parts, and any record always includes the page from which that piece of data originated, so you can link to it to see the full context. MediaWiki won't scale to support billions of records in a database, but for small to medium sized things imo it's perfect.
    - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
Affric 3y ago
And then people demanding free text fields be removed from various forms/b2b/market systems on the basis that they are rarely used… those easily contain all of the most valuable information in the system. The world is highly cursed. The information system which accommodates this is highly blessed.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago

If PDF editing tools were a little better and the average users' file name habits weren't ghoulish we could have digital paper.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago
What naming habits would you like to see the average user adopt?
- doubled112 3y ago
  If I never see people prepending and appending seemingly random versions again, I'd be thrilled. draft_document.pdf document.pdf final_document.pdf final_final_document.pdf document_final.pdf document_v2.pdf final_final_document_v3.pdf Which one do I use?
  - thechao 3y ago
    This is why naively surfacing file systems to users is such a mistake. My gut feeling says that documents should always contain all of their revisions — with a time slider, and marginalia always enabled. However, organization of the documents seems like a critical issue. I can tell you, from my wife's/kiddos desktops, that organization means "one big pile". I strongly suspect that "one big pile" is the right answer, no matter how much it pains my programmer's heart.
    - doubled112 3y ago
      Is it any different than real life? Some people organize their entire lives into boxes and containers and labelled drawers. Some people have, basically, a big pile that they just shuffle through when they need something. For example, I prefer a backpack that's one or two large compartments. Yet they sell backpacks with dozens of little slots. That's too much for me, but somebody thought people wanted it, so somebody must. Over organization doesn't work for me.
    - layer8 3y ago
      The old Word document format (*.doc) could, by accident, contain older versions of the document, as a side effect of how editing operations worked on the internal data structures (not purging all deleted content right away, to optimize editing speed, or something along those lines). This made for some embarrassing cases when third parties received documents with hidden content they weren’t supposed to know about. And we all know of the numerous cases where text was blacked out in PDFs by adding black rectangles on top of it, but the text was still contained in the document.
    - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
      The reason one big pile is the answer, at least for me, is that to do otherwise would be to bog myself down in minutiae of taxonomy. Being hierarchical worked when I was still in school (and somewhat works for work), but one large bucket with the ability to search by content—think iPhoto letting you search for text in photos—is how I run things now.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    I think this is in big part because we got save functionality wrong. The interaction you typically need is to save a snapshot into a different file, and continue to work on the current one. That is, the operation: File -> Save As "file-snapshot.doc" (you're now editing file-snapshot.doc) File -> Open "file.doc" Should've been a single operation: File -> Save current as copy "file-snapshot.doc" (you continue to edit file.doc) The software could even prepend the current date/time to the snapshot name by default, or something. Then, the simplest way of working would always keep "file.doc" as the most recent version, removing the need for the "_v2_final_really_final_final_final" suffixes.
    - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
      While there is software with similar functionality, it is not universal enough for people to expect it to be there and make using it a habit.
- benhurmarcel 3y ago
  yyyy-mm-dd ReferenceIfAny Project NameOfDocument v1.pdf
  - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
    So for a flat structure where filenames are sorted by time of creation?
groby_b 3y ago
Yeah, I too wanted to have paper that runs its own JS interpreter. (Yes, PDFs can embed executable code, because why not)

hcarvalhoalves 3y ago

> More businesses should just use paper. … or rather, digital processes shouldn’t throw away the benefits of paper. E.g.: document databases instead of fixed-schema tabular (paper can accept more data than was anticipated), append-only databases instead of update-in-place (paper doesn’t forget). I’m a big fan of Datomic and similar databases because of that.

ozim 3y ago
Problem is when businesses people want statistics and insights. Unstructured data allows not filling in some data but then data might be required to make analysis. Agent taking free form notes might skip parts that are required for other means than job at hand and agent will optimize for work he thinks is important, some general statistics don’t bother him. Problem is that user on the ground sometimes has to be forced into a scheme of bigger picture of processes. On the other hand too much data is also being marked as required by business - where ad hoc note would do. I see this with our customers where they ask us to implement bunch of fields as “must be filled in” just to start complaining that it takes too long to fill all required in - I did not make all of it mandatory on my own it was their business analysis.

skybrian 3y ago

Why can’t this be done with a textarea for notes? Any chat system or ticket system has this.

timeagain 3y ago
Working for a company that has mixed paper/electronic documentation. I can’t overstate how useful it is to highlight, circle, and/or cross-out sections of a form. Also to see /what/ was crossed out to know the history of the document. You might say, “well we can add these formatting features and make the form elements removable and…”. But if you know you know. Asking “normal people” to do all this in markup is an insta-fail. Most of us are caterers, not programmers.
- coding123 3y ago
  AI can handle the mixed form... Perhaps now with LLMs we can just scan all the stuff with crossed out words and cicled conditions and have the ai make it searchable. Then again we should always ask ourselves if a drug dealer would ever recommend someone stop doing drugs.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    LLMs certainly can cope with disordered notes scribbled into the metaphorical margins, and OCR can usually turn literal scribbles in literal margins into something approximating what was written, buuuuuuuuut the AI we currently have is just good enough to be dangerous if you tried using it this way. On the other hand, the last 15 months have been "if you don't like the state of the art AI, wait a week", so I may be out of date with that assessment.
throwway120385 3y ago
Discoverability. I can't count the number of times I've had to ask phone support people to please read the notes that the last agent took. If you have a paper form, someone marking in the margins is immediately apparent. Hypermedia didn't go far enough, in the sense that it overlooks how people form relationships with specific documents. In case of margin notes, individuals take an instance of a document template and mark it up to customize it. They recognized that the shape of the form was not the only shape the document could take and they knew that the form was an extension of their authority. So if it didn't make sense they changed it. You can't really reproduce that experience with hypertext because there's no concept of "this document doesn't apply to this situation let me, the individual user, change it to communicate something unique." And because humans aren't reviewing any of these documents, there's nobody there to interpret it correctly even if you could. Essentially the Internet and web form design and replacement of humans with machines has involved a great abdication of authority from the front-line employees who process these forms. I would argue that it's becoming the downfall of our modern society. If a programmer or analyst couldn't envision your situation, nobody works at the company who can do anything about it.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago

> And, the killer feature of paper that no digital UI has yet to fully capture is the margin. This is THE reason why, in the year of our LORD 2024, physicians still HATE electronic medical records. Margins, sticky notes, and red ink you can circle anywhere you d~~n well please, not organized data easily parsed during discovery.

BobaFloutist 3y ago
It's not 1:1, but from observing some math professors, tablets with a stylus are a partial solution to this.
- shuntress 3y ago
  Whether or not it is literally hand written is not important. The thing that matters is that it is unstructured.
  - naasking 3y ago
    You can support a structured way to add unstructured data. This can be useful a s a stopgap to understand where the structured data is inadequate, but I can become a hindrance if they don't use the structured data all.
    - RheingoldRiver 3y ago
      This is precisely what MediaWiki tries to do, and it's why I love this software more than anything. You have templates and forms that the user can fill out, but the page is really a piece of paper - outside of the template you can write anything you want at all. With Cargo or Semantic MediaWiki you can even make a database out of the structured parts, and any record always includes the page from which that piece of data originated, so you can link to it to see the full context. MediaWiki won't scale to support billions of records in a database, but for small to medium sized things imo it's perfect.
  - BeFlatXIII 3y ago

Affric 3y ago

And then people demanding free text fields be removed from various forms/b2b/market systems on the basis that they are rarely used… those easily contain all of the most valuable information in the system. The world is highly cursed. The information system which accommodates this is highly blessed.