View Relationship default zoom levels and animation
Currently, when someone goes to view their relationship to someone in Family Tree, we focus on the related person and then have a zoom-out animation to give the full path of how you may be related to that person.
Some users like the ability to see a zoomed-out view because it gives them a big picture of how many people are between them and the other person. Other users have expressed frustration about not being able to read the text because of the zoomed-out view. We are considering a few alternate options to this and would love your feedback.
Option 1: We start zoomed-out to show the overview of how many people are between the user and the other person. Then we would have an animation that would zoom in on the related person.
Option 1B: We start zoomed-out to show the overview of how many people are between the user and the related person. Then we would have an animation that would zoom in on the user person, so they can click and drag up to view all those in-between them and the related person.
Option 2: No animation. Zoom in on the related person.
Option 3: No animation. Zoomed in on the user. (Leave it the way it was before.)
Option 4: Start zoomed out but remember what level you zoomed to the last time you viewed a relationship. (This could be zooming out or zooming in.)
Option 5: Zoomed in on the related person and have an animation zooming out all the way. (How it currently is now.)
We appreciate you taking the time to give feedback that will help create a better experience for all users of FamilySearch Family Tree.
Comments
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I prefer Option 3. Most of the time it will show me and the related person on the same screen, then easy enough to zoom out or reposition the image
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I prefer anything without animation. Things should only move when I explicitly tell them to.
For the zoom level, consider letting the computer do what it's good at: "fit screen". Then the humans at the other end can do what we're good at: determining what's of interest to us.
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Option 1C: We start zoomed-out to show the overview of how many people are between the user and the other person and just stay there.
It would be good to make much more prominent what I think most people probably really want to see:
the text description of the relationship. The sizes of the title and the relationship being the same would be nice.
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To Gordon's point- In any option chosen, I would like to see the actual relationship statement in larger font. I'd be good with reducing the "Relationship to" line font to accommodate that if needed.
To Julia's point- I also prefer no "animation" in any option.
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If I understand the choices correctly, Option 3 is how it is in the soon-to-be-retired format. If so, that option gets my vote.
I wholeheartedly agree with @Julia Szent-Györgyi: "I prefer anything without animation. Things should only move when I explicitly tell them to."
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Option 3 definitely gets my vote. I also would like to see the "Relationship to" be larger.
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Option 3 or 4. The problem with the zoom animation is that if you have to go up 9 generations then come down 7 through an uncle, the animation will zoom all of the way out which makes all of the text and portraits small and unreadable. With option 3 or 4, the zoom level will be in the same spot 100% of the time and if I wanted, I can adjust the zoom level to see through which families I am related to them.
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Just to add a comment to confuse the issue, I'd like to remind people that only when the website is set to English do you get the text statement of how you are related. I recall the discussions back a couple of years when Ron Tanner said they had to give up on doing this for other languages because each language was so different in describing relationships and some didn't have terms at all to use. So keeping in mind that FamilySearch will have to use the same routine for all languages and since we know what Family Tree person we clicked on to open the chart, what is most useful as the initial view for everyone not using the site in English?
Option 4 with no zooming anywhere (which would be my preference):
Option 2 without animation:
Option 3 without animation:
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(Totally off topic now, but in case people are interested in the way different languages describe relationships, I can report that in Norwegian there is none of this "removed cousin" stuff. In the example images above for my wife's second cousin twice removed, in Norwegian he would be referred to as my wife's grandfather's second cousin. As an extreme example, I've always found this video about Chinese relationship terms fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCFRoILS1jY&t=89s )
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I agree with Gordon that the best option is zoomed out, no animation. Yes, as @Kenner Tobias Hartman points out, this will be unreadably small for distant relations, but I don't see this as a problem: I don't need to be able to read the names in order to count/assess the generations in between, and I can get the details I want by zooming in. As I said: let each part of the process do what it's best at. Don't try to make the computer read our minds, and don't force us to do something that the computer is better at (adjusting the zoom to fit the screen).
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