Do you agree that products always have room for improvement?
"Every day there are little things in software that we find annoying. Some write books about it, like Annoyances.org, but I thought this site would be more constructive.
BetterSoftwareSuggestions.com is proudly maintained by myself and the developers at SSW."
- Adam Cogan 
1. Is there a good reason for Microsoft to still show old options in the Windows 10 ‘Printers & scanners’ UI?
The XPS options died years ago, so it is time to remove the option “Microsoft XPS Document Writer”
2. And while we are here, no-one has a scanner anymore, so change the UX from “Printers & Scanners” to the more simple ‘Printers”
I want to sort by the created by date…. So I have added dates into the names.
Feature request – Can you enable users to sort by names
I love Microsoft Forms records the time taken and give us a summary at the end.
Can you work out a reasonable timebox (a touch of Azure AI) based on the other submitted forms and the number of questions…. and give a little beep say every 5 minutes if they have exceeded the time that is reasonable.
One person can forget to finish their Microsoft Form and leave their browser open and it screws up all stats.
As an example everyone in my company was close enough to the 15 minute timebox – this one person ruined the stats.
Can Microsoft Teams show our calls in the chat window… like Skype does?
Of course, maybe it only annoys me… so if there is more logic to this usability, I love to understand.
Dear Work Item team,
When you get an email after an @mention in a PBI, images won’t show… so we can’t tell if there is an image or not…
It should include images in the emails.
[Published on Adam’s Blog – Azure DevOps wishlist: auto-tagging Project Languages & Technologies]
When you’re working, you’re usually working on a single project, and Azure DevOps and Github are great to use. However, I often find myself needing to look across all the active projects that are going on in a company, and that is the stuff that’s hard to quickly see what they are. There are gaping holes to being able to see what the current projects are and what the tech inside them are. This post is about the tech we currently use, and what we’d like to see.
Going to a company and seeing the current projects and what tech is in them is not a particularly easy process – it’s a lot of manual work, and it’s easy to miss a couple.
Say your project is basically a Vue.js, .NET Core 2.1, Azure Logic Apps and Azure AKS. I think it would be wonderful to see that straight away in the tags.
Some NuGet packages are important. e.g. Entity Framework or Azure Table Storage. These tell you a bit about the project before you even have a look at it. An amazing feature would be to improve the Auto Tag feature (for both products). I also think showing these tags would be good advertising for Azure.
For any project, we would like to know the Languages in use (e.g. C#, TypeScript, JavaScript) and Technologies in use (e.g. ASP.NET Core 2.2, Hangfire 1.6).
GitHub has Topics to represent Technologies. The Topics can come from the most popular Topics or can be custom, but they are not automatically added to the project.
Figure: The technologies are displayed, but are not automatically added
Azure DevOps has Languages and these are awesomely automatically added (see figure below). It also has Tags, and these can be used for Technologies, but this is completely manual and you can’t choose from a list of common Tags.
Figure: The Languages are added automatically and include percentage of usage. Tags can be added to represent Technologies
Ideally, we would like to see the best of both worlds as follows:
Wouldn’t it be awesome to use this for comparison across the organization.
PS: Maybe a future relation will be the Analytics Extension (when Code and Build is added) https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms.vss-analytics
Of course, if I got this granted, my next wish would be to be able to see bug regressions, number of deployments to staging, number of releases to production.
Dear Azure DevOps Product Planners,
A couple of projects were added today and I would love them to be sitting at the top. Alternatively give me a sort combo (see red box)
And since I have not opened them, I would like a red dot (like WeChat – the most popular app in China).
This project is empty other than a few commits.
I think the UI should:
#1 Let me know what stuff is empty
#2 Guide me to any new stuff. In this case since I I have not opened the commits, I would like a red dot (like WeChat – the most popular app in China).
Figure: Adding 2 red dots on the newly added commits by someone else, would encourage me to click on the only useful areas
Figure: WeChat UX uses red dots to indicate new things v2