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!
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.
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.
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
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The job market's great right now
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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/ (there are others) makes life easier for creating these.
bookmarklets don't allow for injections into the app so it wont work
Presumably this has to hack around cross-site restrictions nowadays (it's a couple of years since I did any website JavaScript).
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 in a dropdown that's now been added to the input field of the fake vendor app page.
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.
We might have something for you…
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: