Some Feedback on Autofill Extension

[Nathan Baker]

I like this app and it does do what I want it to, but only after a lot of difficulty each time I use it (every few week or so). The app and its design and terminology are far from user-friendly. Each time I use the app, I struggle with remembering how it works and how to use it. 

Here are my suggestions for improvements:

1. When I right-click on the lightning-bolt on the Chrome toolbar, the first option merely says "Autofill." That option takes me to this group. It is confusing to call this option simply "Autofill." Why not call it "Autofill Extension Google Group" or "Discuss Autofill on Google" or "Autofill Support" or something like that?

2. When I click the lightning bolt and the Autofill Extension toolbar appears across the top, the options are not intuitively organized and named. "Execute Profile" and "Generate Rules" are confusing. As I understand it, "Generate Rules" is the function used to create an auto-fill profile, while "execute profile" is the function used to apply an existing auto-fill profile to a form. Since "Generate Rules" logically comes first in using this app, the toolbar should be reorganized with "Generate Rules" on the left and "Execute Profile" on the right. Also, I would rename these options to something more logical and user-friendly. "Generate Rules" should be renamed "Create/Edit Profile" and "Execute Profile" should be named "Apply Profile." And then the button "Generate Autofill Rules" should be renamed "Create/Edit Profile."

3. This suggestion probably involves a Chrome issue that can't be fixed, but I will explain the problem anyway. When I right-click on the lightning bolt on the Chrome toolbar and choose "This can read and change site data," it causes huge issues for me to have to keep changing this back and forth depending on whether I am "generating rules" (creating a profile) or "executing profiles." Typically, when I want to generate rules, under "This can read and change site data" I need to check the option with the specific domain. If I instead check "When you click the extension," the "Generate Rules" function literally will not work, because it will not detect the data that I type into the form. But then when I am "executing rules," I need to change it to "when you click the extension," because otherwise it autofills the wrong data before I can choose a profile. This is super annoying. It is very difficult to remember these subtle distinctions each time I use the app (which can be weeks later). If there is any way to change the settings so that users can distinguish whether  "This [app] can read and change site data" for "Generate Rules" versus "Execute Profile," then that would be highly recommended. 

4. I wish there were a button that could be clicked (and truly toggled on and off) each time I want to "Execute Profile." Instead, there is only a general option to click the lightning bolt and turn the app on, and then it autofills each time I am on a form, whether I like it or not. This causes problems for me because sometimes I create a form with 100 data entries, and I want to start by applying all 100, then the website checks my data and rejects some of the data (e.g., 10 of 100 entries), and I want to go in and manually edit those 10 entries and resubmit my manually edited data. But the autofill app is still running, and it superimposes the data over all 100 entries, including the 10 I have just edited. The way to solve this would be to have a true toggle on/off button on the Autofill toolbar, and/or an option when you right-click the lightning bolt from the toolbar under "This [app] can read and change site data" that would allow users to choose "never." That way, users could toggle back and forth between "When you click the extension" and "never" as needed when a form is submitted and then edited and resubmitted. This would essentially be a manual override option (to override the autofill function). Basically all I am asking for is a literal button that could be pushed each time I want to apply a profile to a form (and an option that allows me to apply the data only when I click the button).

5. On the Autofill Options page, when manually editing a profile, there should be an option to add a new row of data in a profile. Ideally this would be a button the user can click that would replicate/duplicate the last entry/row in a profile, so that the user can then edit the new row. I see an option to "move this rule to another profile," but why isn't there an option to copy/replicate this rule within the same profile? If there were an option like that, profiles could be created and fully edited/expanded from within the options menu, which would come in handy when the app itself is glitching on "generating rules" automatically.

With these and a few other changes, this app would be much more user-friendly, and therefore much more efficient for me to use. Thank you for considering my feedback.

[Autofill Extension]

Hi, thank you for taking the time to submit these feature requests. My comments below...

1. This is Google's design and can't be changed -- the extension title links to the homepage if it's specified. Since Autofill doesn't have a homepage, I thought it would be better to link to this Google Group instead of having no link at all. Do you think it makes more sense to link it to the online docs instead? https://www.tohodo.com/autofill/help.html

2. This is a tricky one. When you select New and enter a new profile name, that action creates a new profile, so it would be a misnomer for the button to read "Create Profile" when that actually took place in step 2. When you click "Generate Autofill Rules", the code either generates new rules or edits existing rules in the selected profile. There is no good way to word this button while keeping the button width short. To be technically correct, the button would read something like "Generate or Edit Rules in Selected Profile". Regarding "Apply Profile", that's subjective because one can argue that it could be renamed to "Process Profile", "Run Profile", "Activate Profile", etc. Humans tend to see the world from their own perspective, so what may make perfect sense to one as "Apply Profile" might be confusing to another person. There's no perfect wording, and if Autofill were operated as a big company with a budget they would probably spend money on focus groups to find out what elicits the most usage :-). I originally chose the verb "execute" because I'm from an old school background where rules and codes were "executed" like the .EXE files from DOS days. I think most long-time users are used to the term "execute profile" by now since when I changed it to "execute rules" they were still saying "execute profile", so now I have reverted it back to "execute profile".

3. This extension is meant to be set to "On all sites" in order to work properly. You should never have to change this, as Autofill needs this permission to be able to read data (to detect form fields) and change data (to fill out the form for you) on the web pages that you visit.

4. One thing a lot of users do is enable manual mode (Autofill Options / Other Stuff tab). In manual mode, Autofill will stay in the background until you manually select Execute Profile (from right-click context menu or infobar). If there's a profile you rely on often, you can assign it a hotkey like Alt+1. If there's a profile or rule(s) that you want to always autofill even when you're in manual mode, then you can specify that in the Advanced tab (see https://www.tohodo.com/autofill/help.html#advanced).

5. You can click on the [+] button at the bottom to add a new rule (row). There's currently no way to duplicate individual rules, but you can duplicate a profile, which effectively duplicates all the rules in that profile as well.

Cheers,
Tom

[Nathan Baker]

Thank you for the response. Here are my latest thoughts.

1. That makes sense. Under the circumstances, I think it is probably best the way you have this linking to this Google discussion group.

2. The best terminology is complicated. However, I still feel there is a disconnect between "Execute Profile" and "Generate Rules." One of them uses the word "Profile," while the other one uses the word "Rules." On a surface level, it is not clear how these two options interrelate. Whatever these functions are named, they either should both use the word "Profile," or they should both use the word "Rules." That would help explain how the functions relate to each other. I also continue to believe that the "Generate" option should be on the left, while the "Execute" option should be on the right, since the Generate option logically comes first in the sequencing.

3. After using this Autofill app extensively since I wrote my original post, I have had less trouble with this issue. For me, the solution has been to always select the option that reads "When you click the extension" for "This can read and change site data." As long as I don't choose another option, I have not had problems.

4. Thank you for the suggestion. This could work as a complicated toggle on-off switch. I will try it out in the future. I do still think it would be even better if there were simply a button that could act as an on-off switch. To explain my problem in more detail, sometimes I need to submit dozens of entries on a form, then the website checks my data and tells me to delete a few of my entries (because that data has already been previously submitted), so I dutifully delete the specified entries (make those data field blank) and resubmit, but then the Autofill extension automatically reinserts the data into all the blank fields, whether I like it or not. And even worse, if I happen to miss one of the fields that I am supposed to delete/make blank, the website will start me through the entire process all over again. To solve this problem, it would be extremely helpful to have a button that I could literally click only when I want the data to be filled in, and then the app should not re-fill the data if the form is refreshed. Your suggestion does allow for this approach, but with several steps. A single button would be ideal. 

5. Thank you for pointing out the (+) button.  This is very helpful.