Lessons from spreadsheets for product design
One of the remarkable things that I have noticed in my career so far is the persistence of spreadsheets to manage business processes. You keep making it redundant in one process and a new sheet springs up somewhere else.
What explains our love story with spreadsheets?
- Fidelity of creation — The person thinking about how a process should be set up is often the same as the one creating the sheet for managing the process. Creation and usage happen in the same place. So nothing gets lost in translation between requirement and output. It is instantaneous.
- Universal accessibility — Pretty much everyone understands a spreadsheet and what can be done with it with zero training time.
- Infinite flexibility — Excel is often the first tool of choice for anything ranging from budgets and management reports to running simulations. Even within my specialization of product management, I have seen spreadsheets for backlogs, usage analytics, customer interviews, design mockups and bug tracking.
- Instant analytics — Manipulation of information is simple. The ability to quickly filter, sort, search, delete, insert or pivot goes a long way in making sense of the data you have and helping to take some actions in the real world.
Building a software to replace a spreadsheet based process is a rite of passage signifying that the process is now big, complex and valuable enough to offset the loss of all the flexibility we have discussed above.
But do we really need to lose all the good parts of spreadsheets when we start to use software? I don’t think so. Business software can borrow some of the basic design principles of spreadsheets and become better for it.
Allow modification of things in-place.
It is surprising how many applications do not allow you to make changes to things without taking you to a different screen (or at least opening up some kind of a pop-up window). Allowing edits to add, to change or to rename things in the same place where they are shown should be the default behavior everywhere.
Make it simple to recover from mistakes.
Spreadsheets are designed around the reality that we will make mistakes or make some changes as an experiment. Ctrl + Z anticipates and encourages errors. When you know that the system has got your back covered, you can focus your cognitive energy on the problem you are solving. You need to try and provide the same peace of mind in applications wherever possible. So figure out which user actions should be reversible (and for how long) and build a way to achieve it. For any irreversible actions, ensure there is clear communication.
Use WYSIWYG for configurations.
Even in applications which are highly configurable, the configuration tools and screens are not only kept separate from the user screens but also look very different. By making the design of the configurations reflect what the users would finally see, the tool becomes intuitive enough to not require a specialist for performing system set-ups or making changes. The end users can themselves do it. Combine this with the ability to recover from mistakes (or use proxies such as showing previews of the impact) and you have a truly powerful software.
Provide a way to create rules.
One of the things that any business user hates about software is needing to rely on an engineering team to make minor changes such as adding a new field, putting in validation conditions and automated calculations. Such requests typically get into a queue and take some iterations before it reaches a satisfactory state. In spreadsheets, the simplicity with which you can add in formulas is a key advantage. Enterprise software can take a leaf out of this and should enable UI based guided rule set-up. I have seen users falling in love with the system when you provide such a tool in their hands.
Thankfully, such features are becoming a norm in today’s enterprise SaaS tools. More power to this.
Make it easy to repeat things. My personally rewarding moment when working on a spreadsheet is when I drag down a bunch of cells after writing and validating a complicated set of formulae in one row. And see the rules get applied on a few thousand rows. It is surprising how most enterprise software do not provide ways to repeat actions quickly. A large proportion of delivery and support bandwidth goes into doing the same actions with minor variations.
Need to set up 100 new users? Do it one by one clicking the same buttons over and over again until you blank out and make a mistake.
Need to add a new field to 10 reports? Go to the report configuration, search for the first report, open the settings, go to the relevant place, add the attribute, move things around. Rinse and repeat 9 more times.
I would even argue that bad design which makes people repeat almost similar things makes them hate their work. Particularly in teams whose job description is to implement and manage such applications. Figure out how to make their lives better through better workflow and interface designs.
Allow ad-hoc analysis. Export to excel. While you systematize the lessons from spreadsheets and improve your software, know that you can never make your users forget about spreadsheets, particularly for any quick analysis.
Acknowledge the truth. Spreadsheets have existed much before your software was needed and will exist much after your software will be needed. It reflects a reality about the inevitability of change in any process and the need to quickly respond. Do not fight it but co-opt it. Provide a way to easily export data in your software to spreadsheets so the cycle can start afresh 🙂
Originally published at http://vivekrajasekaran.com on November 4, 2021.
