Great job on your site design. I have not looked at the source, but it loads quickly, works without JS, and all the elements are accessible with keyboard hints.
Everyone should read support emails
201–210 of 214 posts
Re: Everyone should read support emails
#202This is why we regularly take developers to customers. It is eye-opening to see on-site that your mobile app with tiny but well-designed buttons doesn't work for registering container positions when the user is in a shaky 90 metric tons weighing machine, handling 30 metric ton containers. We write software for container terminal and other logistical actors, and seeing the software being used by real users is so incre…
I think that's valuable, but depends on the organization. At a company I worked at engineering used to go on customer visits, but the "customers" were the executives and managers who make buying decisions and put forth requirements. However, these were not the folks who actually used the product. Their opinion was important (gotta sell it) but it was NOTHING like what we saw in support. The the few times end users we…
> The the few times end users were there, they clearly did not give their honest opinion in front of their bosses. And really even folks giving feedback who use a product are poor at doing son.
Actually I worked over 2 years at a company developing in-house tools. For almost all tools/projects I talked directly to the end-users. 2 observations:
1) users become greedy when it comes to features (especially those users in supervisor/manager positions)
2) there's a tipping point with amount of desired features when users actually start preferring to use the newly developed software instead of a previous solutions
Re: Everyone should read support emails
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
At one previous employer, I got into some heat for being that "low level tech" that went directly to users' cubes and talking to them directly instead of waiting for stuff to filter up and then back down chains of command. The users were really excited to see some features they had needed for years finally implemented and all it cost them was buying a bored college intern lunch a couple times. The managers were so un…
Yeah, going directly to the end user is almost certainly best. The amount of times you find people spend 2 hours of their days on what would be literally a 5 minute fix (my favourite being the select with a thousand options that wasn’t alphabetically sorted) is mind blowing. And all that just to preserve some egos. Though to be fair, in some cases users do request crazy stuff, you just shouldn’t listen to them and lo…
I love finding those high impact, straightforward changes! I support dozens of spreadsheets at work and am the person people call when one breaks.
* Conditional formatting cut a 2 hour weekly job down to under 5 minutes.
* The intern, who was hacking away and learning VBA, spent around 20 hours and was able to automate 4 hours per day of manually retyping info between Oracle and a couple spreadsheets. Would have been about 2 hours if he knew VBA going in, but he learned a ton.
* 2 hours standardizing a spreadsheet format and making a custom macro to shift values by x rows and y columns turned a monthly 2 hour, tedious update task into 2 minutes.
Re: Everyone should read support emails
#204Now its impossible to email many companies I find. You click on "Contact" and get Twitter, Instagram, Facebook... but not email :(
> Now its impossible to email many companies I find. You click on "Contact" and get Twitter, Instagram, Facebook... but not email :( I did the website for a nonprofit I set up recently. From past experience leaving a catchall "contact" email address around, we decided to omit a public email address this time because we didn't want it to be harvested and subscribed to random newsletters.
But there must be way to deal with it. A form (where you can enter your return email). CAPTCHAs.
Re: Everyone should read support emails
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, going directly to the end user is almost certainly best. The amount of times you find people spend 2 hours of their days on what would be literally a 5 minute fix (my favourite being the select with a thousand options that wasn’t alphabetically sorted) is mind blowing. And all that just to preserve some egos. Though to be fair, in some cases users do request crazy stuff, you just shouldn’t listen to them and lo…
I love finding those high impact, straightforward changes! I support dozens of spreadsheets at work and am the person people call when one breaks. * Conditional formatting cut a 2 hour weekly job down to under 5 minutes. * The intern, who was hacking away and learning VBA, spent around 20 hours and was able to automate 4 hours per day of manually retyping info between Oracle and a couple spreadsheets. Would have been…
Every company needs one person who can make simple changes to inefficient business processes and save a ton of time.
Re: Everyone should read support emails
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is all about scaling. You want to do 10x the customers with 2x the employees, so that the business finally starts to make money. The service level that took 10-15% of your resources back then would take the majority of your resources now; the same % of your resources now is much less hours per customer.
There shouldn't be a linear increase in support requests with a larger customer base. As your product scales to more customers, the percentage of support requests generated should be going down as you improve your product and support documentation based on existing customer support requests.
This ("shouldn't be a linear increase in support requests") is true some of the time, but not all of the time in all lines of business. Make a thing foolproof, and the world will go on generating greater fools, you will see a greater variety in weird requests or bizarre expectations, etc.
Re: Everyone should read support emails
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not a perfect world and IMO most people really aren't trying / putting in the effort on the things we think they should That's a managerial problem not a technical one, so any technical solution like dumbing down the user interface will almost certainly fail.
If your user interface is so simple that understanding it doesn’t take any effort at all, that’s a pretty great thing. I imagine the hypothetical lazy user thinking ‘I cannot figure out a way to convince my boss that I do not understand this UI...’
> If your user interface is so simple that understanding it doesn’t take any effort at all, that’s a pretty great thing.
Nah, that's an indicator the software is most likely not very useful. Like in code, in user interfaces too there's both essential and accidental complexity. Plenty of the latter to improve on, but reducing essential complexity === reducing features === reducing utility of the software.
> I imagine the hypothetical lazy user thinking ‘I cannot figure out a way to convince my boss that I do not understand this UI...’
I imagine said lazy user asking the boss to buy a training course. If that software is so important for the company, a training course is both useful and cheaper than hiring someone who maybe can learn the software themselves in place of said lazy user. Training courses tend to provide ample opportunity to slack off too, so that's a double win for the lazy user :).
(That said, from personal observations of my wife's and mine, people seem to be split on that somewhat halfway - one half will jump at the opportunity to learn something new and progress at their workplace or in their career, the other half will roll their eyes and ask "why should I bother"? That latter group responds to "because it's that or your job" argument, though.
Re: Everyone should read support emails
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's valuable, but depends on the organization. At a company I worked at engineering used to go on customer visits, but the "customers" were the executives and managers who make buying decisions and put forth requirements. However, these were not the folks who actually used the product. Their opinion was important (gotta sell it) but it was NOTHING like what we saw in support. The the few times end users we…
> The the few times end users were there, they clearly did not give their honest opinion in front of their bosses. And really even folks giving feedback who use a product are poor at doing son. Actually I worked over 2 years at a company developing in-house tools. For almost all tools/projects I talked directly to the end-users. 2 observations: 1) users become greedy when it comes to features (especially those users…
I think when you say users become "greedy" it's that they don't truly understand the depth of the problem they want to solve. It's not that they are in a true definition sense of "greedy", but ignorant about the cost vs benefit analysis. If if was explained to them it would take 20,000 man hours to solve their issue, and then it would put them out of a job, most of them would clam up.
Re: Everyone should read support emails
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love finding those high impact, straightforward changes! I support dozens of spreadsheets at work and am the person people call when one breaks. * Conditional formatting cut a 2 hour weekly job down to under 5 minutes. * The intern, who was hacking away and learning VBA, spent around 20 hours and was able to automate 4 hours per day of manually retyping info between Oracle and a couple spreadsheets. Would have been…
Every company needs one person who can make simple changes to inefficient business processes and save a ton of time.
I feel like there are a couple of obvious problems that exist:
- Knowing that such a person exists - Knowing that the fix is simple - Knowing that they will have time to look at a thing quickly
I'm a person who will answer any question on any topic if asked, and help anyone with anything if I have the ability to do so. That's because I enjoy doing stuff in general and my long projects aren't meaningfully going to suffer. Counterpoint, the only people pestering me on this are friends / close colleagues and it wouldn't scale.
I reckon that the net benefit of being willing to do that to the company is positive, but honestly I'd do it anyway because sometimes 2 hours hacking on a powershell script is a welcome distraction!
Re: Everyone should read support emails
#210This is why we regularly take developers to customers. It is eye-opening to see on-site that your mobile app with tiny but well-designed buttons doesn't work for registering container positions when the user is in a shaky 90 metric tons weighing machine, handling 30 metric ton containers. We write software for container terminal and other logistical actors, and seeing the software being used by real users is so incre…
sounds like you make apps to help logistical actors to drop their phones.