I love to see effective yet brutally-simple "redneck engineering" solutions to software problems, particularly ones that straddle the line between genius and stupidity in a way that makes architecture astronauts feel uncomfortable.
I used to work at an brokerage that worked with a panel of around 12 providers, all of whom offered 5+ products that were updated multiple times per year to meet changing regulatory requirements. When a sales adviser recommended product X from provider Y to a customer, the adviser would then need to fill in an application form that was precisely tailored to that particular revision of that particular product. Bear in mind that these were complex, multi-sectioned forms. Needless to say, this created a huge workload for the devteam to keep track of all the product changes and update the UI accordingly each time.
At some point, someone on the devteam had the genius idea to simply take the PDF application forms from the provider, extract the individual pages as PNGs and overlay HTML form elements on top of them. The provider would essentially be doing our UI design for us. Add in an editor tool so the sales managers could set up the forms themselves and a tagging system so specific fields could be pre-filled from customer data we already had stored in the DB and the devteam's workload dropped by maybe 90%. Simple, stupid perhaps, but effective.
I used to work at an brokerage that worked with a panel of around 12 providers, all of whom offered 5+ products that were updated multiple times per year to meet changing regulatory requirements. When a sales adviser recommended product X from provider Y to a customer, the adviser would then need to fill in an application form that was precisely tailored to that particular revision of that particular product. Bear in mind that these were complex, multi-sectioned forms. Needless to say, this created a huge workload for the devteam to keep track of all the product changes and update the UI accordingly each time.
At some point, someone on the devteam had the genius idea to simply take the PDF application forms from the provider, extract the individual pages as PNGs and overlay HTML form elements on top of them. The provider would essentially be doing our UI design for us. Add in an editor tool so the sales managers could set up the forms themselves and a tagging system so specific fields could be pre-filled from customer data we already had stored in the DB and the devteam's workload dropped by maybe 90%. Simple, stupid perhaps, but effective.