Home Page placement of Sign In and Create Account

LegacyUser

Carolyn Jean Arnett said: People are having problems signing into FS if they have their screen shrunk and don't realize one needs to click on the 3 lines for a drop down menu. Suggest that besides the Help, that the sign in & create account also listed there. Would just mean an adjustment of placing on the page.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: Most sites already have this responsive web design in place for several years. It is just something you have to figure out and is part of using technology imo.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Jordi, just 'cause everybody's doing it doesn't make mystery-meat navigation a good idea. This was Not A Good Move on FS's part.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: Eh, I disagree. But Carolyn's idea could be a good use the white space now created at the top of the page at the threshold until a new threshold with a lower viewport width is reached.

LegacyUser

David Newton said: Why is it "just something you have to figure out"?

It's a deliberate internal design choice, it's not like it's an external agency forcing the change. Consider upgrading away from Windows 7: THAT is something you just have to figure out. That is because it is over 10 years old, obsolete and support has been withdrawn.

The design team certainly need a far better rationale than that. The big tabbed redesign had such a rationale: making things load faster it's arguable whether that was achieved, but the proper reasoning to do it was at least there.

Is there such a proper rationale for this? No idea.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: What is called the hamburger menu is certainly not new. When I first came across it, It was part of a place research page redesign, which made absolutely no sense to me. I had been involved with the computer industry for my entire career, going all the way back to my military service in 1963, and had never used the before in my life.

In that case, there was no shrunk screen, but that the symbol had replaced what was previously used (Menu). Thankfully, the team responsible for that page got away from the symbol (and menu, as far as that goes).

In a way, this is like the international symbols used on many roads throughout the world. While the United States has been slow in adopting international standards (we still use mph and miles, rather than kph and kilometers) the adjustment was accompanied by driver educational materials.

The problem is that when it comes to user educational materials, FS gave up providing them a decade or so ago because the site changes happened with such frequency and the approval process for Church-published manuals took far too long resulting in newly published manuals being out of date before they were even published. Thankfully, The Family History Guide folks came to the rescue and do an admirable job of keeping up with the changes.

There is no easy solution because first and foremost, FamilySearch does not use or adhere to any kind of site style guide so we get a wild mix of terminology, the way links are expressed, and so on. I don't know if development team management will ever reach the point where they recognize the tremendous need for consistency -- I seriously doubt it.

We can only hope, but in the meantime, lets help each other in this forum whenever we come across a message from someone unfamiliar (despite their expertise) with a new symbol and what we in the user community believe it stands for.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: imo it is something that just has to be figured out because it frankly should have already been figured out. The reason probably has to do with "Responsive Web Design" which newer sites are implementing and old sites have not. FamilySearch.org is wanting to implement this as it should. I am not saying they have implemented it the best way yet, though. When I wrote my initial response, I was focusing on the "don't realize one needs to click on the 3 lines for a drop down menu" part of this post.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Jordi, do you seriously actually LIKE mystery meat?

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: Similar to my other post, here is a suggestion for the the sign-in page. I like Adrian's idea of having the Sign in and Create Account links be just one link that takes you to the actual sign in screen where you can also open an account to solve the problem Heidi brought up of people accidentally hitting the Create Account button. I'm putting up just the full screen version and the completely minimized version without the intermediate steps. There seems to be plenty of room to keep the sign in button there. (As always, click on the images to enlarge.)

Current new version:



Suggested modification:



Changing to Adrian's suggested "Login/Register" would make the button smaller.

I am aware of the problems that Family Search runs into with different languages. I have no idea how long of a button "Sign In / Create Account" might need in other languages. It might be far too long for this to ever work. Are there icons that could be used for this as the page gets narrower? I have seen site use simply Account which shrinks to just a person's silhouette when needed.

Of the current languages, French appears to need the most room:

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: I like the hamburger menu icon because it makes the page look cleaner when you make your window smaller.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: I think you uploaded the wrong picture for your suggested modification.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: Haha, but I totally forgot about language differences.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: No, that is the home page I see when not signed in.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: Oh, I see what you mean, I uploaded the same one twice. I'll have to fix that tonight when I get back home to my desktop computer. I'm at work now.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: OK, I'll try this again:

Original:



Suggestion:

LegacyUser

Paul said: I rarely find signing in to be the problem. On this - and the issue is far worse on many other websites - it's how you sign OUT that is far more unclear!