At my new job, we sell imported stuff. In order to be able to sell said stuff, currently the following things need to happen for every incoming shipment:
Invoice arrives, in the form of an email attachment, Excel spreadsheet
Monkey opens invoice, copy-pastes the relevant part of three columns into the relevant parts of a spreadsheet template, where extremely complex calculations happen, like =B2*550
Monkey sends this new spreadsheet to boss (email if lucky, printer otherwise), who sets the retail price
Monkey opens the reply, then proceeds to input the data into the production database using a client program that is unusable on so many levels it's not even worth detailing
Monkey fires up HyperTerminal, types in "AT", disconnect
Monkey sends text messages and emails to customers using another part of the horrible client program, one at a time
I want to change Monkey from myself to software wherever possible. I've never written anything that interfaces with email, Excel, databases or SMS before, but I'd be more than happy to learn if it saves me from this.
Here's my uneducated wishlist:
Monkey asks Thunderbird (mail server perhaps?) for the attachment
Monkey tells Excel to dump the spreadsheet into a more Jurily-friendly format, like CSV or something
Monkey parses the output, does the complex calculations
Monkey sends a link to the boss with a web form, where he can set the prices
Monkey connects to the database, inserts data
Monkey spams costumers
Is all this feasible? If yes, where do I start reading? How would you improve it? What language/framework do you think would be ideal for this? What would you do about the boss?
There are lots of tools that you could apply here, including Python, Excel macros, VB Script, etc.
In this case, PowerShell seems like an excellent choice, as it naturally combines COM access to Office, .NET, and scripting, and is all-around-awesome. If you already know a suitable technology, you'll get the job done fastest with what you know. Othewise, PowerShell.
(C# 4.0 is also reasonable, although earlier versions suck when interacting with Office's COM interfaces.)
Don't get carried away trying to solve the whole problem at once. Start by picking a small, easy part that gets you a lot of value right away. You are more likely to succeed this way. (To get your boss to agree, you need success fast. If you aren't telling your boss, you need success even faster!). Once you have that done, you can use your new-found free time (maybe only a few minutes per day) to extend your tools and skills to the next bite-sized piece. Success will accelerate success.
In time you will replace monkey with code, and either get a promotion or quit in disgust and get a better job.
The big parts are Excel and email. Excel can be handled with either COM or some sort of interaction with OpenOffice.org. Email, well, there's dozens of ways to do it. My hammer of choice is Python, along with pywin32 or PyUNO, and poplib and smtplib.
Boss... will always be boss. Not always very much you can do about the icky wetware stuff.
I'd start by asking myself the following questions
Does the invoice have to come via email or can there be a web form where the users can enter the data? There is a easy way to put a form on google docs so you can download the response in excel format in a common format set by you. I'm sure there are better ways too.
Does the boss need to create a new spreadsheet of can you provide him with a database app where he can view your form, enter the price, check "approved" and have that fire off the process that puts it in the production db?
Can the interface to the client program be worked around? Can you have some other app call the client
Can the text to the end user be sent by you and not the client app? If so, ca you automate that part
Just some thoughts.
One solution to #1 is to send email to a Unix server (instead of Exchange) and use procmail to dump out attachments (see http://gimpel.ath.cx/howto_fetch_proc_metamail.html for an example of how)
As for boss, have a nice web page which you can email him a link to. And send him a short email (3 lines or less) telling him that using that page will save him 30 mins of work over the course of a month and you 2 hours of work in a month. Just be prepared to back up the #s.
However, very high level, un less you're prepared to do the whole automation thing on your own time, you better be able to sell your boss that overall time savings x6 months are less than time to develop this. 'cause may be monkey salary in his eyes is low enough that the cost of software is just not worth it - and sadly he just may be right depending on how complicated a bulletproof robust solution is.
As I noted above, your last question is probably the most salient. It is probably best approached as a personal skunkwork project where you show the boss a completed product one day, collect your innovation bonus and then get fired because a stupider monkey can now do your job instead of you.
Related
I want to make a program for a very catered, specific purpose, to aid me in making a large set of quest mods to the videogame Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I’m attempting to do this through either excel or Visual Basic, and here I’ve provided a little summary of how dialogue works in the game’s normal creation program and then what I want to create outside of it and improve on.
How Morrowind Dialogue works?
For those of you who may be familiar with the game, you’ll remember that the talking to NPC’s will bring up a set of text, and this text is their dialogue. There are different “topics” that if an NPC has dialogue set for, the player can see the topic and click on it, bringing up a new wall of text, and this is generally how dialogue works in the entire game on the player’s end.
In creating a Morrowind Mod, the way dialogue really works in the “Construction Set” (the program used to create and edit the game) is that a database contains every entry of text, and this these entries have conditions set to them which limit which NPCs can say a given entry of dialogue. So for instance, a topic like “latest rumors”, will have lots of entries in it with lots of different NPCs having something to say about it. The topic itself is a condition of sorts with potentially dozens of entries attached to it, and conditions set to specific entries can also be applied. Conditions can include checking to see if the NPC is in a given city, if the in-game time is night or day, if the player is at a certain numbered stage/index of a given quest line and much, much more. This system is what makes all quests possible and the game dynamic.
What I want to create:
I am beginning a rather large mod project that includes many entries of dialogue, many new and old topics, and many quest and quest stages. I could list all the reasons here but essentially my problem is that the Construction Set has many limitations in terms of organization that make it difficult to make a large mod’s dialogue in. I would be better off to design, set the topics for, and edit all of my dialogue entries outside of the Construction Set program and implement them when I’m confident that the writing and quests are finished.
Essentially if this is too complicated I could just write all the quests and dialogue in Microsoft Word, but optimistically I'd like to do something more dynamic and helpful to me, as a writer, and be able to use real variables to store and set Journal/Quest Indexes, filter dialogue by Quest or by NPC, and easily edit dialogue and quests without getting lost in the normal game’s thousands of lines of other dialogue.
*I can't post more than two links here, but I posted on reddit and there I have a gallery showing how the Construction Set works and what I have made in Visual Studio so far:
https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/4oap6w/making_an_application_in_visual_basic_to_handle/
So, my intention is to make a program in Visual Studio using Visual Basic or Python that leaves me with a program that lets me write, organize, and set the text for dialogue and filter based on conditions.
This likely requires creating a database file for the program in Visual Studio and being able to create variables in runtime, for the program. That is because I want the user of the program to be able to add new dialogue topics, new journal/quests, and all of these things will have conditions with values associated with them.
Any help, advice, and direction is appreciated. I am relearning Visual Studio (I took two courses in it) and I am unfortunately very new to excel and databases in general.
You are correct in that a database of some kind would be needed. However, you could approach this several different ways depending upon your comfort level, money, portability requirements, etc...
One way to do it would be to use XML to store your data. It has the advantage of being extremely portable and transformable. Since this is likely a program where only one person would be directly accessing the data at any given time, it might be your best bet.
Another option is to use MS Access if you have office. This gives you a workable, albeit fairly basic, relational database. This would probably be a better choice if you have 2 or 3 people that could possibly be working in it.
A third option would be a full DBMS. MySQL is free and you could install that to your local machine, or to a remote server. Installed to a remote server would give you the option of allowing many people to connect to it and modify data transactionally. However, this would be overkill if it is only a one or two person system.
Circling back around to XML... That will most likely be your best bet. It is simple and integrates perfectly with .Net applications. It can be imported/transformed to any data-store later once you are finished (or multiple times as you progress). Interfacing with XML via .Net allows you to work with it like a database within your code, so if you design your data layer properly up front, you could even migrate to a full database later if the project expands drastically. The biggest downside to XML would be that it isn't relational in the way that a regular DBMS is, and it is not inherently transactional. You do not have atomic updates, so if you have several people modifying things at once you could lose data if it is overwritten.
You could get around that to an extent by writing a more advanced data layer to interface with the XML files, but if only one person is making changes locally, and then the data file is, say, uploaded to a remote datastore later, the only thing to keep in mind would be coordinating when and who can modify that file. Mostly logistics stuff at that point.
This may be a question for Survey Monkey, but I felt that someone here may have encountered something like this in past experiences. Is there a way to work with the API of Survey Monkey (SM), to add the information from the survey straight into a database of my own? I realize that I can generate the information into output files, but I was wondering if there was a way to directly access the information from the SM database. I feel like this might cause some privacy concerns for SM. Has anyone attempted this, or would the best option of mine be to create my own surveys without a third party website?
I had a similar issue and here's my solution.
I was doing health related surveys which contain HIPPA protected Personal Health Info. Zapier is NOT HIPAA safe, so the "zap the results over to Google Drive" solution didn't work.
So I wanted a quick n dirty way to grab SM survey data and begin to design a data structure to analyse and store this data. I figured that I would start with <1000 results, sort it out, then build out a bigger/fancier structure as needed.
I just downloaded CSV's of the SM individual responses, munged the downloaded CSV files to make a Python CSV reader happy, then wrote a Python 3.5 script to grab the survey data and spit it out into a couple of output CSV files designed for different analytic purposes.
It was really quick and easy to alter the Python script to deliver different subsets of data to different output files, and really quick and easy to see if these output (CSV or XLS) files really told me what I wanted to know.
This is a really quick and easy way to start analysing right away without spending too much time on procedural overhead. You can alter CSV (or XLS ) tables really quickly and easily, so you can mix and match data / derivative data as much as you want. A wise person once told me "don't think, do." So the more you analyse on small runs of data, the better your final Big Buildout In The Sky will look.
Yah, you can spend a lot of time writing and API and setting up a dbase, but if you are not completely happy with what you want out of the SM data, start small. Hope this helps.
Okay, this question isnt exactly very clear, because i cant write it as a single question.
I have a game that i am designing using javascript, and it is basically a multiplayer game.
So say there is two players, player darklord and angel
angel shoots darklord
so darklord loses 1 life.
Now what happens is that i use ajax to submit the number of life that darklord loses.
And the request is GET /shootout.php?shooter=darklord&life=-1
so this allows me to store the new life of darklord.
Now the problem is say angel knows about computer, and he starts requesting /shootout.php?shooter=darklord&life=-3
Thus darklord loses more life then he should have. So angel cheated in the game.
No i want to prevent this kind of requests, and i am trying to get a way so that my requests can be hidden. I mean i know i can encrypt the url. So say i encrypted it such that the request should be GET /enc.php?e=934ufj30jf for darklord to lose a life, and different values of e for angel to lose a life, or gain a point. However for this to work i will need to send the data to the client, as in tell the javascript to request this url.
Now the user can easily go around reading the source of the file in order to find out what are the new requests for doing things,
I have found and thought of many other ways, but they all limit the amount of cheating or effect the game-play etc.. None of them eliminate this security completely.
So now my question is how do i make sure that users dont send data that is not real. How do i stop them from cheating?
I have thought of the best way being that i use server side scripts to actually calculate the possibility of someone shooting someone else and then matching it with the client input, but that will effect execution time by a LOT, so i am trying to find other ways, some public key encryptions?? (problem is the user can put the data as they want and then encrypt it) tokens? (problem is the user can put the data as they want and then put the current token)
so any other ideas anyone??
This isn't about hiding requests, it's about implementing proper access controls. Your example is referred to as an insecure direct object reference in that manipulating values in the querystring relating to direct DB objects causes an unintended outcome (have a look at OWASP Top 10 for .NET developers part 4: Insecure direct object reference).
There are a couple of things you can do but the most important is implementing proper access controls. You must authenticate the caller of the service and authorise them to perform the requested activity (and this all has to happen on the server). In this case, angle should not be able to perform an action on behalf of darklord.
The other thing you can do is use an indirect object reference map (refer to the link above), which obfuscates the IDs of the player with cryptographically strong, user-specific alternatives. You probably don't need this in addition to the access controls but it does give you more unpredictability.
Finally, think about the flip-side as well - if darklord is able to pass the amount of damage as a parameter, what's to stop him from re-issuing the request manually with "life=-100"? It will depend on the specifics of how the attack action is performed, but you're going to want to avoid people gaming this action too.
You have to assume that the user is completely in control of the client JavaScript. The only way to make this secure is to do the check on the server side.
You should not send result of action. You should send action.
i.e angel shoot darkangel from point (7,15) with angle 36 degree
than server checks is it correct shoot and decrease lifes of darklord
There was an excellent answer given on this subject a couple of years ago. It actually refers to Flash rather than JavaScript, but the security concerns and techniques are going to be applicable to this situation too.
What is the best way to stop people hacking the PHP-based highscore table of a Flash game
You should never have the client tell the server what changes to make in player state (eg. remove X amount of health) because the client could always be cheating. Instead only have the client tell the server what input the player has made and then the server determines what happens as a result of that input.
Although this doesn't remove the possibility of cheating by writing a bot that plays the game automatically (and is better at the game than any human player) you at least remove overt cheating of the "I did 10,000 damage, trust me" variety.
Detecting bots is best done by tracking behavioral data and doing data mining to find cheaters. And if there is no behavioral difference between bots and human players, then who cares about the bots.
I am looking for some ideas on enhancing a trial-user's user experience when he uses a product for the first time. The product is aimed at a particular domain and has various features/workflows. Experienced users of the product naturally find interesting ways to combine features to get the results they want (somewhat like using an IDE from a programmer's perspective).Trial users get to use all features of the product in a limited fashion (For ex: If there is a search functionality, the trial-user might see only the top 20 results, or he may be allowed to search only a 100 times). My question is: What are the best ways to help a trial-user explore/understand the possibilities of the product in the trial period, especially in the first 20 - 60 mins before the user gives up on the product?
Edit 1: The product is a desktop app (served via JNLP, so no install required) and as pointed out in the comments, the expectations can be different in this case. That said, many webapps do take a virtual desktop form and so, all suggestions are welcome.
Check out how blinksale.com handles this. It's an invoicing app, but to prevent it from looking too empty for a new account, they show static images in places where you'd actually have content if you used the app. Makes it look less barren at first until you get your own data in.
if you can, avoid feature limiting a trial. it stops the user from experiencing what the product is ACTUALLY like. It also prevents a user from finding out if a feature actually works like they want/expect/need it to.
if you have a trial version, and you can, optimise it for first time use. focus on / highlight the features that allow the user to quickly and easily get benefits for useful output from the system.
allow users to export any data they enter into a trial system - and indicate that this is possible/easy. you don't want them to be put off from trying something because of a potential for wasted effort.
avoid users being required to do lots of configuration before using a trial. prepopulate settings based on typical/common/popular settings. you may also want to consider having default settings for different types of usage. e.g. "If you want to see what the system is like for scenario X, use configuration J. If you want to see what the system is like for use case Y, use configuration K." where J & K are collections of settings best suited to a particular type of usage.
I'll speak from personal experience while evaluating trial applications.
The most annoying trial applications are those which keep popping up nag screens or constantly reminding me that I'm using a trial. Trials which act exactly like the real product from the beginning till the end of the trial period are just awesome. Limited features are annoying, the only exception I can think of when you could use it is where you have rarely used feature which would allow people to exploit the trial (by using this "once-in-lifetime" needed feature and uninstalling). If you have for example video editing software trial which puts "trial" watermark on output, I'd uninstall it as soon as I'd notice it. In my opinion trial should seamlessly integrate into user work-flow so that once the trial ends they would think "Hey, I have been using this awesome program almost each day since I got the trial, I absolutely have to buy it." Sure some people will exploit it, but at the end you should target the group which will use your product in daily work-flow instead of one time users. Even if user "trials" it 2 times per year, he will keep coming back to your product and might even buy it after 2nd or 3rd "one-time use".
(Sorry for the wall of the text and rant)
As for how to improve the first session. I usually find my way around programs easily, but one time only pop-up/screen (or with check-box to never show it again) with videos showing off best features and intended work-flow are quite helpful. Also links to sample documents might be helpful. If your application can self-present itself (for example slide-show about the your slide-show program) you could include such document. People don't like to read long and boring help files, but if you have designer in your team, you could ask him to make a short colourful intro pdf. Also don't throw all the features at the user at the same time. Split information into simple categories and if user is interested into one specific category keep feeding him more specific information. That's why videos are so good, with 3-6 x ~3-5 minute videos you can tell a lot. Also depending how complex your program is you could include picture with information where specific things are located on the screen.
Just my personal opinion, I have never made a trial myself. Hope it helps.
An interactive walk through/lab exercise that really highlights the major and exciting offerings of your application.
Example: Yahoo mail does the same when the users opt to use new mail interface
There are so many ways you can go with this. I still can't claim to have found the best approach.
However, my plan from the beginning with my online (Silverlight) software was to give away something thousands of people will find useful and can use for free. The free version is pretty well representative of the professional product, with only a few features missing that enhance productivity (I'm working on those professional features now). And then I do have a nag popup that comes up every 5 minutes suggesting that you should buy it. That popup can be dismissed as many times as you want. I know that popup will annoy some people but I suppose that's the trade off. There is no perfect plan. But I don't think the occasional nag popup scares that many people away, especially when it can be dismissed with a single click.
I was inspired by Balsamiq Mockups, which has been hugely successful over the past couple years. My trial/nag popup way of doing things was copied almost exactly from Balsamiq. I honestly don't know if this is the ideal plan, but it has obviously worked for them. By the way, I think another reason for Balsamiq's success is that the demo doesn't have to be downloaded & installed. Since the demo is in Flash, there's a very high conversion rate of users actually trying it and becoming addicted to it.
I'm a software developer who has a background in usability engineering. When I studied usability engineering in grad school, one of the professors had a mantra: "You are not the user". The idea was that we need to base UI design on actual user research rather than our own ideas as to how the UI should work.
Since then I've seen some good examples that seem to prove that I'm not the user.
User trying to use an e-mail template authoring tool, and gets stuck trying to enter the pipe (|) character. Problem turns out to be that the pipe on the keyboard has a space in the middle.
In a web app, user doesn't see content below the fold. Not unusual. We tell her to scroll down. She has no idea what we're talking about and is not familiar with the scroll thumb.
I'm listening in on a tech support call. Rep tells the user to close the browser. In the background I hear the Windows shutdown jingle.
What are some other good examples of this?
EDIT: To clarify, I'm looking for examples where developers make assumptions that turn out to be horribly false about what users will know, understand, etc.
I think one of the biggest examples is that expert users tend to play with an application.
They say, "Okay, I have this tool, what can I do with it?"
Your average user sees the ecosystem of an operating system, filesystem, or application as a big scary place where they are likely to get lost and never return.
For them, everything they want to do on a computer is task-based.
"How do I burn a DVD?"
"How do I upload a photo from my camera to this website."
"How do I send my mom a song?"
They want a starting point, a reproducible work flow, and they want to do that every time they have to perform the task. They don't care about streamlining the process or finding the best way to do it, they just want one reproducible way to do it.
In building web applications, I long since learned to make the start page of my application something separate from the menus with task-based links to the main things the application did in a really big font. For the average user, this increased usability hugely.
So remember this: users don't want to "use your application", they want to get something specific done.
In my mind, the most visible example of "developers are not the user" is the common Confirmation Dialog.
In most any document based application, from the most complex (MS Word, Excel, Visual Studio) through the simplest (Notepad, Crimson Editor, UltraEdit), when you close the appliction with unsaved changes you get a dialog like this:
The text in the Untitled file has changed.
Do you want to save the changes?
[Yes] [No] [Cancel]
Assumption: Users will read the dialog
Reality: With an average reading speed of 2 words per second, this would take 9 seconds. Many users won't read the dialog at all.
Observation: Many developers read much much faster than typical users
Assumption: The available options are all equally likely.
Reality: Most (>99%) of the time users will want their changes saved.
Assumption: Users will consider the consequences before clicking a choice
Reality: The true impact of the choice will occur to users a split second after pressing the button.
Assumption: Users will care about the message being displayed.
Reality: Users are focussed on the next task they need to complete, not on the "care and feeding" of their computer.
Assumption: Users will understand that the dialog contains critical information they need to know.
Reality: Users see the dialog as a speedbump in their way and just want to get rid of it in the fastest way possible.
I definitely agree with the bolded comments in Daniel's response--most real users frequently have a goal they want to get to, and just want to reach that goal as easily and quickly as possible. Speaking from experience, this goes not only for computer novices or non-techie people but also for fairly tech-savvy users who just might not be well-versed in your particular domain or technology stack.
Too frequently I've seen customers faced with a rich set of technologies, tools, utilities, APIs, etc. but no obvious way to accomplish their high-level tasks. Sometimes this could be addressed simply with better documentation (think comprehensive walk-throughs), sometimes with some high-level wizards built on top of command-line scripts/tools, and sometimes only with a fundamental re-prioritization of the software project.
With that said... to throw another concrete example on the pile, there's the Windows start menu (excerpt from an article on The Old New Thing blog):
Back in the early days, the taskbar
didn't have a Start button.
...
But one thing kept getting kicked up
by usability tests: People booted up
the computer and just sat there,
unsure what to do next.
That's when we decided to label the
System button "Start".
It says, "You dummy. Click here." And
it sent our usability numbers through
the roof, because all of a sudden,
people knew what to click when they
wanted to do something.
As mentioned by others here, we techie folks are used to playing around with an environment, clicking on everything that can be clicked on, poking around in all available menus, etc. Family members of mine who are afraid of their computers, however, are even more afraid that they'll click on something that will "erase" their data, so they'd prefer to be given clear directions on where to click.
Many years ago, in a CMS, I stupidly assumed that no one would ever try to create a directory with a leading space in the name .... someone did, and made many other parts of the system very very sad.
On another note, trying to explain to my mother to click the Start button to turn the computer off is just a world of pain.
How about the apocryphal tech support call about the user with the broken "cup holder" (CD/ROM)?
Actually, one that bit me was cut/paste -- I always trim my text inputs now since some of my users cut/paste text from emails, etc. and end up selecting extra whitespace. My tests never considered that people would "type" in extra characters.
Today's GUIs do a pretty good job of hiding the underlying OS. But the idosyncracies still show through.
Why won't the Mac let me create a folder called "Photos: Christmas 08"?
Why do I have to "eject" a mounted disk image?
Can't I convert a JPEG to TIFF just by changing the file extension?
(The last one actually happened to me some years ago. It took forever to figure out why the TIFF wasn't loading correctly! It was at that moment that I understood why Apple used to use embedded file types (as metadata) and to this day I do not understand why they foolishly went back to file extensions. Oh, right; it's because Unix is a superior OS.)
I've seen this plenty of times, it seems to be something that always comes up. I seem to be the kind of person who can pick up on these kind of assumptions (in some circumstances), but I've been blown away by what the user was doing other many times.
As I said, it's something I'm quite familiar with. Some of the software I've worked on is used by the general public (as opposed to specially trained people) so we had to be ready for this kind of thing. Yet I've seen it not be taken into account.
A good example is a web form that needs to be completed. We need this form completed, it's important to the process. The user is no good to us if they don't complete the form, but the more information we get out of them the better. Obviously these are two conflicting demands. If just present the user a screen of 150 fields (random large number) they'll run away scared.
These forms had been revised many times in order to improve things, but users weren't asked what they wanted. Decisions were made based on the assumptions or feelings of various people, but how close those feelings were to actual customers wasn't taken into account.
I'm also going to mention the corollary to Bevan's "The users will read the dialog" assumption. Operating off the "the users don't read anything" assumption makes much more sense. Yet people who argue that the user's don't read anything will often suggest putting bits of long dry explanatory text to help users who are confused by some random poor design decision (like using checkboxes for something that should be radio buttons because you can only select one).
Working any kind of tech support can be very informative on how users do (or do not) think.
pretty much anything at the O/S level in Linux is a good example, from the choice of names ("grep" obviously means "search" to the user!) to the choice of syntax ("rm *" is good for you!)
[i'm not hatin' on linux, it's just chock full of unix-legacy un-usability examples]
How about the desktop and wallpaper metaphors? It's getting better, but 5-10 years ago was the bane of a lot of remote tech support calls.
There's also the backslash vs. slash issue, the myriad names for the various keyboard symbols, and the antiquated print screen button.
Modern operating systems are great because they all support multiple user profiles, so everyone that uses my application on the same workstation can have their own settings and user data. Only, a good portion of the support requests I get are asking how to have multiple data files under the same user account.
Back in my college days, I used to train people on how to use a computer and the internet. I'd go to their house, setup their internet service show them email and everything. Well there was this old couple (late 60's). I spent about three hours showing them how to use their computer, made sure they could connect to the internet and everything. I leave feeling very happy.
That weekend I get a frantic call, about them not being able to check their email. Now I'm in the middle of enjoying my weekend but decide to help them out, and walk through all the things, 30 minutes latter, I ask them if they have two phone lines..."of course we only have one" Needless to say they forgot that they need to connect to the internet first (Yes this was back in the day of modems).
I supposed I should have setup shortcuts like DUN - > Check Email Step 1, Eduora - Check Email Step 2....
What users don't know, they will make up. They often work with an incorrect theory of how an application works.
Especially for data entry, users tend to type much faster than developers which can cause a problem if the program is slow to react.
Story: Once upon a time, before the personal computer, there was timesharing. A timesharing company's customer rep told me that once when he was giving a "how to" class to two or three nice older women, he told them how to stop a program that was running (in case it was started in error or taking to long.) He had one of the students type ^K, and the timesharing terminal responded "Killed!". The lady nearly had a heart attack.
One problem that we have at our company is employees who don't trust the computer. If you computerize a function that they do on paper, they will continue to do it on paper, while entering the results in the computer.