Have a genealogist work with your engineers to make your site more user friendly.
I do research and also teach beginners how to use the FamilySearch site. Even being a seasoned user it is sometimes hard to find what I need to accomplish or it is buried so deep that I have a hard time finding it. For instance, I knew there was a way to add the unrelated or not yet related people I find in documents to FamilySearch. I used the HELP tab and typed in "add unrelated people." Nothing relevant popped up. I happened to listen to a class from the FamilySearch Library and they said that to add unrelated people you go to the Family Tree Tab and then click on Recents. Then you scroll clear to the bottom of "50" people and there it is. I don't know how many years I have been looking for this. Why Recents? Why clear at the bottom. The person I find isn't someone I recently look at and if that is where you think it should be, put it at the top. If you had a someone who was actually doing research to work with your engineers they could make your site so much more user friendly. I would think the engineers would also really appreciate have the input of someone who understands what people are looking for and how to make it easier for them to find. The engineers could actually become more efficient and not have to go back and redo things after complaints come in about something.
I have too many people in my classes say that it is just to hard to find things and they just want to give up.
Diana Hess
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Part of the problem is that the Help Center's search function is, um, barely functional at times. Ditto for the search here in the Community.
There have been multiple discussions over the years about the location of the "add unconnected" button; the consensus (as I recall it) has been that no, the bottom of Recents isn't exactly intuitive -- but neither is anyplace else. No matter where it could be put, it'd be unconnected. By definition.
For whatever it's worth, "bottom of Recents" does not always actually involve scrolling past 50 profiles: clicking Recents on any Tree page (profile or chart) puts the button in the "frame" of the drop-down, which is immediately visible regardless of the state of the scrollable list.
It's only on the (relatively recently added) full-page Recents list (that you get to from the top menu) that you have to scroll to find it.
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Yes, that Unconnected Person issue has been a recurring theme here. But I have never read anyone propose where to put it instead. What would you suggest? Where would you like to see it?
It must be a complex problem since Ancestry's solution is to not allow it at all. There all you can do is add a non-relative to an existing tree first then detach that new person from the family.
Also, yes, FamilySearch is a massive, complex site and people need to take the time to explore and find where everything is and how it works. Particularly since the programmers have built in at least two, if not three or four different ways to accomplish almost any task. But I would be pretty sure that FamilySearch has a number of genealogists on staff that work with the program designers on a constant basis.
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To be honest, I don't think we need a genealogist to work with the engineers. We need someone qualified in User Interface Design to work with the engineers, because the current UI for FamilySearch is a muddle that appears to have just grown.
One way to tackle a UI is to drive it from the data. If that were the principle, then we'd have a People menu under Family Tree with sub-options like Find, Recents, and Following underneath People plus the desired Add Unrelated.
As it is, the Family Tree menu starts with Overview - which is training material and in my own view shouldn't appear under the functional elements, then we have Tree and Person. Those two don't seem to carry out any functionality other than to bring up the Tree diagram and Profile view for the current person - even though on first entry, we haven't got a current person so default to the researcher - I assume. Then we have Recents, etc. Tree and Person arguably go together under Tree-type functionality, while Recents, etc, belong under People-type functionality.
Referring to Tree-type functionality, and People-type functionality illustrates two approaches to the UI design - process-based and data-based. My own gut feeling is that those 2 approaches can appear together but need to be kept as separate dropdowns at the very top under Family Tree. The current scenario is a muddle with both appearing on one drop-down.
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So I think an appropriate place to put "+ Unconnected Person" is in the following path from menu: Family Tree, Person and here split into 2 functions with a drop down list of "Go to Person Page" and "+ Disconnected Person". Now if adding a drop down function within that list of Family Tree options is too hard, then simply add "+Unconnected Person" to that list.
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Making it relatively hard was perhaps aimed at discouraging people from just going ahead and creating whole trees in FT that ignored existing profiles completely... though there are many other aspects of the UI (not to mention gedcom import etc.) that don't seem to me to encourage good data quality at all.
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@MandyShaw1 suggested
"Making it relatively hard was perhaps aimed at discouraging people from just going ahead and creating whole trees in FT that ignored existing profiles completely... "
It's an interesting thought.
Another possibility is that the designers could only envisage FS users growing their own families, and therefore everything they added would be to the fringe of their own families as children, parents, spouses, or whatever. No need for adding an unrelated Person in that way of working. Except... Imagining that was the only way of working would be a "courageous" decision.
Even though I only work on my own families, there are occasional cases where the simplest way to do something is to add an unrelated person then add some family data to them and (only then) connect it to my lot. Depends on how simple it is to grow a logically sourced tree in one direction compared to another.
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And yet, Ancestry -- the king of individual trees -- does not offer a direct means of creating an unconnected profile. You have to add a spurious connection and then disconnect it. I'm sure there are many people who do the same thing on FS, having not noticed the function at the bottom of Recents.
Adding a disconnected profile is easy on WikiTree (Add menu -> New Person), but I have yet to turn up a way to do so on Geni and MyHeritage, so FS is far from alone in this lack of easy/intuitive function.
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