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."
When I look at Microsoft Viva Insights, I can see the people I communicate most with, but not whether it’s going up or down over time.
I want to see the trend so I know who I should spend some more time with.
It should show how far up or down someone has moved, similar to a leaderboard.
Figure: The gain or loss arrow gives a nice indicator of change in positionFigure: I should be able to see who has done more or less communication this month
I think this would be affecting every Microsoft Forms customer who reads the results. When I look at results on the Microsoft Form, they can be ordered alphabetically, or by user, or by date filled. However, I cannot order them by the order I wrote the original questions in.
Therefore, I currently solve this by prefixing every question with a number, so it orders by the number.
Instead, there should be an option to sort by the order of the options (and it should be the default order).
Figure: As a workaround, we use numbers to order by option type, but it would be better if this was built-in
When it comes to software, user experience is paramount. One area that could benefit from improvement is the way we handle ‘My Access’ approvals.
Current Experience
When someone requests access, the recipient gets a detailed email with a neat table. This table clearly shows who requested what access and their reasons for doing so.
Figure: Access request shows reasons
Room for Improvement
However, when it comes to approval notifications, the details are missing. The recipient only knows that the access was approved but doesn’t see who approved it or why. To find this information, they have to click a link and navigate through the history to locate the specific approval.
Figure: Approval email doesn’t show who approved it and why they approved the access
Suggestion
It would significantly enhance the user experience if the approval email could directly provide these details, similar to the access request email. This change would offer users a consistent experience, reduce the number of steps to find information, and increase overall efficiency.
TinaCMS is awesome and has the best editor. It can be used on a public site like www.ssw.com.au where the users are known and will be added to the database.
However for a public site like SSW Rules www.ssw.com.au/rules where users are _any_ github users, then the problem is each user needs to be added to the database _before_ they can make any changes.
FYI – TinaCMS also has the issue of not allowing GitHub users to directly contribute to the content repo like what NetlifyCMS and Keystatic allow. This means no more GitHub green squares!!
Note: Similar products such as NetlifyCMS (aka DecapCMS now) do not have this limitation, nor does Keystatic.
Figure: See my green contributions to SSW.Rules.Content under Contribution activity https://github.com/adamcogan
At SSW we are rolling out the use of the Approvals App with Teams to get requests approved through the organization. I love how easy it is to create templates and use them to submit requests. Previously we were using emails to manage these approvals, so another benefit is a reduction of noise across our collective inboxes.
Once an approval is submitted there is no way to alter the data. While this makes sense for requests that have been approved, it would be great if we could edit requested approvals prior to being approved. Currently, the only way we can do this is submit another request which means manually entering all information again which takes time.
Send another request with the updated information.
❌ This can be time consuming if multiple edits need to be made
❌ Copying information to another request can be error prone
❌ Approval system gets polluted with duplicate requests
Suggestion:
Add the ability to edit an approval request prior to it being approved.
This would include changing the approver (if the template allowed the user to select approvers)
Figure: Lack of an option to edit an approval requestFigure: Only able to edit approvers during request creationFigure: Viewing details of an approval request after it’s sent
Every company has the need for requests to be approved. We’ve found that the Microsoft Teams Approval App works well, but only in simple cases. It is easy to create templates and use them to submit requests.
When companies switch from emails to a centralized structured approval, processes improve, and emails are reduced.
Senior Management are often responsible for approving most requests and as such can have a large backlog of requests to approve. In order to help approvers action the most important requests I would like to see the following enhancements:
Allow Priority to be set in Custom Approval Templates – ideally the priority level would be set in the Custom Approval Template, and not able to be changed by the user making the request.
The ‘Request title’ field is not enough. We need another column called ‘Approval Template Type’.
We can sort on the column titles, but we need the ability to filter by Priority and Approval Template Name
Figure 1: Approval Hub – Can see Priority and Title, but not Request TypeFigure 2: Not able to filter by Priority and/or Request TypeFigure 3: We are able to configure priority for basic requests, but NOT able to do this for Custom Request Templates. We need access to this field in Custom Request Templates.Figure 4: Why are there only two priorities? We would like to have 3 levels (for example, similar to how Outlook works (see below))Figure 5: In Outlook we have 3 priorities. For consistency, we would like 3 priorities in the Teams Approval App also.
We have Azure DevOps connected to Azure AD so that our users can log in with their Azure AD credentials. Currently, DevOps does not show our users’ Display Name that is set in Azure AD.
Users can change their own name here, but this is not a fix. For the sake of consistency, display names should match the display names used in Azure AD.
Figure: Display Name in Azure AD (with [SSW])Figure: Display Name in Azure Devops (missing [SSW])
Xero monthly payroll has a bug with the defaults, when creating a leave request. Unfortunately, this issue can only be fixed by Xero.
Xero is calculating leave request hours based on actual hours in the month, but it should use standard hours per day averaged… which for some companies doing monthly payroll would be 8h per day (8h per day * 5 days per week * 52 weeks / 12 months = 173.3333h).
Say an employee has taken leave for 2 days. They would expect to see 16h in the leave request, however they see:
Figure: The leave hours are a mess and then it is saved incorrectly. In this case the accountants would later have to manually change this to 8h + 8h
Sadly, this bug has been present for +7 years and there has been heated debates… Xero has acknowledged the issue, but no fix has been implemented.
The problem with the above is that the bug can cause incorrect leave requests. While it can be manually overwritten by the accountants, it does not offer great user experience.
Note: You could fix it by adding a dedicated package like Employment Hero (or another HR app) – such apps can process leave requests within the HR app itself and then send the leave request into Xero