Balancing User Input
11/1/22
I always struggling balancing user input with just concrete decisions. If I am working with someone to put together a report that uses some parameter, I like to allow the user to change that parameter without needing to come back to me. Not because I don’t enjoy fulfilling these requests (I do) but because I always like feeling like I’m empowering people to do their own investigation.
Suppose I am given a list of names and am expected to query a data source to find similar names. Some names match exactly, but others don’t. I could go back and forth with this person to identify matches, but why not just cast a wide net by fuzzy matching, adding a “closeness” column, and then letting the end user decide which threshold should be used as a match?
Deciding on the proper amount of user intervention vs. automated process is a skill I’ll continue to work on.