Some potential OFN improvements from a small Normandy producer

[NickWeir]

Here is an excerpt from an email from Guillaume who was a VERY welcome visitor to the Drome gathering:
Dear Open Food Network builders,

As asked this morning by some of you, let me write the few small evolutions that I beleive would make the use of the plateform easier for us as producers and all the new coming ones !

It might be things that I actually ignore but are already possible to do (but then you will teach me how to do so then

To limit the error riks, I would put an error message when no distributor is selected at the end of the sale cycle creation.

When the delivery time and place are not filled, an error message appears but doesn’t tell you what is the mistake so it is not alway easy to find for non tech friendly farmers. Moreover, it might be nice (for my personnal case) to be allowed to settle these informations definitively in the enterprise profil like paiement methods or delivery points for instance.

Concerning the report part, Rachelle has the order preparation report format that I designed to be efficient and minimise order preparation mistake risks. It is what I would love to get directly from OFN to not have to play with Google drive, dynamic sheets and so on and avoid risk of mistakes concerning the harvesting report, I would be happy to only get the usefull following informations on it : name/unit/quantity of units/total quantity on a vertical csv file (actually the best would be that we could print directly from OFN, if I can express my OFN dreams’ here

So far I use the report “per producer” to know my total sales per cycle which is not that intuitive… Maybe we could have a small report to get the info directly and that this report could also be used to follow the history of sales per week, month and year for instance, on a defined period of time. (and analyse the business evolution and results)

The mails gathering seams to be resolved from this morning which is a big progress for me =) Lets use it this week to see what ils my ability to make it work now

Oooh yes, another thing that would make me save time is to sort products per alphabet order on the admin product part , pleaaaase !!!

There is the long loading time to get to the boutiques page for clients but I am sure that you are aware of that and doing your best…

I am using ranges of weight for some stuffs like pumkings or even cabages for instance. Would it be possible to include this fonctionnality on products ? Like instead of puting |1| |kg|, we would enter |0.75| to |1.25| |kg| ! That would be really more efficient for me as producer and nicer to read for clients rather then in the product description currently.

I think that this is it, I did my best to tell you all the incrementations that could be usefull. Definitely nothing urgent but ideas if ever you run out of topics on which to work on for OFN I personally need to take some time to get to know better how to use tags for doing restrictions but I will do it on the coming weeks !

Guillaume Haelewyn

[Rachel]

I’ve split each item the following way:

To limit the error riks, I would put an error message when no distributor is selected at the end of the sale cycle creation.

I believe this already exist. But if you press ok (see screenshot below) the OC is still created. Do we want to keep this behaviour? I will see with Guillaume the exact steps to reproduce this if I misunderstood.

When the delivery time and place are not filled, an error message appears but doesn’t tell you what is the mistake so it is not alway easy to find for non tech friendly farmers.

Does someone remember how to trigger this error message? When I leave the field empty I just can’t click on the update / create buttton. While during an update the field is circled in red, during an OC creation it is true that I don’t know why I can’t click on “update”. Nothing tells me that the “ready for” field is mandatory. So I’ve opened this: Add red * on all the mandatory fields when creating a new OC · Issue #3910 · openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork · GitHub

Moreover, it might be nice (for my personnal case) to be allowed to settle these informations definitively in the enterprise profil like paiement methods or delivery points for instance.

I’ve opened a wishlist so we can discuss it here: Be able to define the "ready for" field in the user profile rather than in the OC

Concerning the report part, Rachel has the order preparation report format that I designed to be efficient and minimise order preparation mistake risks

See here: Hub can easily generate accurate packing slips - #50 by Rachel

The rest will be solved by: Provide a more flexible reporting functionality with rich data access - #19 by luisramos0

Oooh yes, another thing that would make me save time is to sort products per alphabet order on the admin product part , pleaaaase !!!

See here: Sorts product per alphabetical order · Issue #3909 · openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork · GitHub

There is the long loading time to get to the boutiques page for clients but I am sure that you are aware of that and doing your best…

See here: Global Gathering 2019 - Day 8 - Pipe Prioritisation - DEV PIPE

I am using ranges of weight for some stuffs like pumkings or even cabages for instance. Would it be possible to include this fonctionnality on products ? Like instead of puting |1| |kg|, we would enter |0.75| to |1.25| |kg| ! That would be really more efficient for me as producer and nicer to read for clients rather then in the product description currently.

See here: Be able to put range of units rather than single units

[Rachel]

@NickWeir

To limit the error riks, I would put an error message when no distributor is selected at the end of the sale cycle creation.

Ok so I review this with Guillaume, and the problem is different than from what I’ve understood: when you add a distributor in outgoing, you have to check again all the products you want to sell although you already selected these products in incoming. Does anyone remember why? ping @lin_d_hop @Kirsten @tschumilas @MyriamBoure @luisramos0

This causes errors, because sometimes he’s forgotten to select again his products there and as a result no products appeared on the shopfront. There are two solutions I see here:

A. Display a confirmation message at the creation if no product has been selected
B. Select all product by default in outgoing, letting people being able to deselect product if they wish so

Both I think are stuff we can add directly on Github as “good first issues”, right?

[luisramos0]

I think they are both improvements in GH easy for experienced developers , I’d feel a bit sorry for the first timer to get into this part of the code… so, I’d say GH improvement but not goodfirstissue

[lin_d_hop]

Hi Rachel,
This has been a horrid experience forever. I would be utterly joyous to implement something that prevents this from ever happening.

My preference would be option B as I think this solves the most challenges. Option A, to my mind, only helps people on their first OC set up (as most people create OCs by duplicating the last one) therefore it is not overly useful.

Adding some thinking about the use cases.

Case 1 - User has only one outgoing distribution.

1. User adds incoming to OC.
2. All automatically appear in outgoing
3. User removes 2 items from the outgoing (they could do this at incoming but they have the choice, and do this in outgoing)
4. Then user adds new incoming items
5. We need to ensure that the outgoing items remain in the same state. New incoming items are automatically added to outgoing.

Case 2 - User has more than one outgoing distribution
In this case do we wish to:
a) add new products to every outgoing distribution?
b) add to none?
c) something else… an additional complication to the UX.

[Kirsten]

I can’t remember if it actually got fixed or just drove us crazy until we worked it out . . but in point 3 below there used to be a problem if you removed from incoming but not from outgoing (i think) and ended up with phantom products floating around in shops. If that is still the case would need to make sure we don’t increase liklihood of it happening?