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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

These are mostly things that programmers who are also end users care about. I haven't run into a single non-technical user who cares about customizable colors, dark mode, exporting to CSV/JSON/whatever else, customizable shortcuts etc.

The average user won't even know what most of this list means.

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Enterprise users love excel import/export. Potentially CSV as well.

Maybe as far as "I want to see this table in Excel". And that too for very specialized roles and use cases.

So do enterprise developers. If I can use the "well they can do that in excel" defense to avoid implementing a feature, I will.

It might be more specific to the program the blog belongs to, which looks like a live dashboard for data. If you have a dashboard on some giant monitors all over your HQ, customizable colors & branding will matter a lot.

Users do care about things like that if you ask them in non-technical language. "Would JSON export be important to you?" is the same question as "Do you want to be able to download and backup your data?" but each question will get quite different responses in most cases.

An important skill for senior developers is to be able to talk about technical things to non-technical people, and not to dismiss the opinions of users based on their lack of technical knowledge.

No, I don't think end users care the smallest jot about what format their data gets exported in for backup, just so long as they can re-import it (otherwise it's not really a backup, is it?) The only time I can think of that they might care or have an awareness that formats matter is if said data is being transported between different applications where there is some pre-existing standard (e.g. BeerXML in the world of brewing caculators.)

Aside from that you've conflated two unrelated requirements.

I am building a data visualisation software. Colors is all they are asking for and the hardest to implement in a "satisfy all constraints" way.

Similar as we devs like to use grep on text files there are uses that want to manipulate data in Excel, so they want your app to output into CSV or import from CSV if it can apply for your app.

Power users certainly use CSV files when uploading to other systems. Banks allow export of transactions as CSV files. Web shop import CSV files for prices.

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