Its the Little Things

Over the course of my career, I’ve worked on several technologically challenging and novel solutions. I’ve worked on optimising routing solutions, completed rewrites of applications many times over, led UI/UX overhauls, worked on complex performance optimisations with databases involving 1 billion rows, and much, much more.

Out of all of them, the thing that I’ve received the most outward praise for was adding an autocomplete to a dropdown.

In my mid-career, I was consulting for a farm-to-door startup. They ran an end-to-end operation, with their own warehouse, their own packing team, and freelance drivers who did the deliveries. It’s relevant to know that I was working remotely, and had never seen any of it.

They had an in-house back-office admin panel and terminal computers (laptops) where they were open. In the admin panel, the orders to pack queued up in order of priority, and the packing team there picked the orders and packed them in a just-in-time fashion, attached a label (printed by the admin panel), and handed them off to the drivers.

In their back-office admin panel, they had a couple of dropdowns that they used to select the inventory item group that was assigned, to keep track of stocks. In their workflow, they picked items, packed them, printed the label, selected the inventory group, and marked the order as packed. These inventory item groups sometimes ran into 100s of items, and it was a plain old HTML dropdown. At each picking and packing, they had to click the dropdown, scroll through the alphabetically ordered items, select one, and continue their work.

One of the earliest pieces of work that I did there was adding a Select2 dropdown in place of that, with some niceties like frequency-based sorting and search autocomplete. I mostly forgot about it as the work itself was inconsequential for me.

Cut to a few months later, I had a chance to travel to their location and warehouse. When I went there, the introduction I was given was basically, “He’s the one who added the dropdown with search,” and that instantly identified me. People cheered and patted me on the back, saying thanks, offering to buy me lunch. This was my first introduction to American hospitality, so I was pretty overwhelmed.

Then they gave me a tour, and I saw how the packing actually worked. Because the produce needed temperature-controlled storage, packing didn’t start until the delivery schedule was near and a driver was allocated or already at the warehouse stop. So at the time of packing, there is literally someone standing there waiting to pick up the order and start their route. The terminal is shared by multiple people with different packing orders, so on top of the driver waiting, there’s a queue of your colleagues waiting on you to pick your inventory group and mark it as packed.

And the terminal they used was an old thinkpad laptop and scrolling through it with gloved fingers, or with an hand damp from picking from cold storage, was a battle in and of itself. And when a change landed in which they just had to click a dropdown and the item they wanted to pick was just a couple of keystrokes away, it was a night-and-day improvement for them.

I was there for one month, and it was a pretty happy experience for me. Mostly because the people were very sweet and friendly, but also partly because of the recognition as the guy who saved them lots of frustration in their work. I really was bought lunch when I was there and a bike ride on American highways as a thank you.

Ever since, I’ve made sure to focus on building delightful experiences rather than just software that does things. And that focus is only getting more valuable. If generating software is cheap now, the scarce thing becomes knowing which small thing matters, and that knowledge doesn’t come from the spec. It comes from being in the room.