What happened to the Lists feature?!

LegacyUser

Gabriella Zavilla said: Dear Recipient,

First of all let me start by making sure that my message is taken as user experience feedback usable for research with suggestions rather than a lump of moaning. However, I also would like to voice my frustration.

I noticed in the past few days that the previously called List feature has changed to Following. Please take this constructively but I'm sorry to write that it is not at all as convenient a feature now as it used to be. Let me elaborate and tell you what was great before and what makes my work so much less enjoyable now.

Lists
Previously we could see a list of the people we followed with basic birth and death information (place, date). This was very convenient when having multiple names of the same kind so that we could compare and review quickly. I have many Anna, Maria, Joseph and so on. I cannot see this basic information now which makes the comparison very hard.

We were also able to narrow our list by searching for the place or date of birth and death in this list if there was any added. This was very useful to narrow the list as I have families all over the globe. This is also gone.

Now to see a clean list I have to look through on all names in a pop-up. Surely when you have as many people as I do (over 2000) you understand why this is neither space effective nor comfortable. I can not see the information I need and you probably have an awful time with the lazy loads.

Contributions/Changes
Previously we could see all changes in a list and tick a box to hide changes made by us. It was perfect as I'm making large amounts of changes. What I'm interested in is what other users did to people that I am following. If I want to figure that out now I have to scroll through a large list of changes in a drop down for each person and try to visually filter what I have made. It's time consuming and can lead to me missing a change made by another user. It means that I can miss out on finding an active contact who is researching the same people as I do. It is a extremely powerful to find people of my family or relations who can share more information than is added on FamilyTree.

Instead of being able to reduce the changes list I have a separate tab to see all the changes I made and yearly statistics around those. I'm not finding this useful at all but if anyone can tell me a benefit I'm all ears for it!

Is there any way at all that I can do the search narrowing and get the basic place and date info in the Following tab? I haven't been able to see that in the Options.

My suggestion would be to show the basic details of the person e.g. birth/ date/place and direct lineage 1 line up and down (e.g. parentage and wife/husband)
This would mean a tremendous help in the comparisons.

For Changes I find it great that all the changes for 1 person are collated together rather than many separate line. However, we still need a way of being able to filter down the changes we made. Also, how long back does this feature check the changes?

The user interface implementation in this feature is very slick by the way! I found it much nicer to took at and less taxing on the eyes.

I'm not sure if any of this can be remedied or even if in fact they have been raised by others. However, I do a lot of work on FamilySearch and really appreciate all the insight it gave my during the last year. It is for FamilySearch that I can thank meeting may relatives and built my tree for 8 generations back and growing.

Please keep up the good work and reach out to us users for any help! I know as an IT Product Manager that it is the most precious commodity and I'm more than haply to help in any way possible!

Thank you,
Gabi Zavilla

LegacyUser

Paul said: Welcome to this forum, Gabriella.

If you scroll through the list of topics raised here, you will find a number have been raised on issues relating the the replacement of the old "Changes" feature to the current "Following".

The good news is that it is the intention of the program developers to reintroduce the ability of search on date and also to filter out changes made by yourself. Unfortunately, this will still not restore some of the facilities that proved so useful to us everyday / frequent users, as were available in the former feature.

The Following feature was trialled in the beta version of the program. I made a firm request (on this forum) that it should not be moved over to the production version without modification, as it was obvious there would be a lot of complaints about the useful features (including sorting individuals in last name order) that were being withdrawn.

Sadly, my (and I'm sure other users') appeals were not listened to and now FamilySearch developers have given themselves an extra workload in having to address the problems that have been reported. (Well, at least in part.)

There have been some excellent enhancements to the Family Tree program since its introduction. Unfortunately, the changes made in this case are not all proving to be helpful for those who have a large amount of individuals we are "following" and who make many changes to their profiles, on a daily basis.

LegacyUser

Gabriella Zavilla said: Hi Paul

Thank you for your reply!

Yes I saw the number of feedback raised. This was my first post and so I wasn't aware of the Community. I have read through some of these now.

I'm puzzled over the fact that they don't just rever the changes back given how many complaints there are but then I assume they have their reasons. Maybe it's database relational. Might have move CRM etc.

I only started using FS earlier this year so I don't know how the Beta version looked like. I have to say tho that I am well impressed with the quality of the site and the usefulness. I hope that they keep up the work and that they will start to listen to users especially for the ones with large member trees!

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Gabriella,

If you look at them, the new "lists" have a significantly different "look and feel" to them. My understanding is that this new look is based on a new set of common functions that FS wants to use throughout the web site to improve their ability to maintain it.

So that is an example of at least one reason that they don't just reverse the changes back to how it was.

It would have been possible to make all of the improved maintenance changes with this new software, but doing it in a way that still supported all of the original Use Cases. It seems that creating the new lists with the new common software was the "opportunity" to get rid of functionality that they didn't think was necessary. Now they just have to put it back in while still keeping the new common software "look and feel".

LegacyUser

Bryce Roper said: This morning we turned on the ability to hide your changes in the following list. You can find this ability under the options tab. In the coming weeks we will add the ability to sort by name, birth and death date, sex, and ID.

LegacyUser

Gabriella Zavilla said: Hi Bryce,

Thank you that is great news!
Can I just as when you say we'll be able to sort by these properties you don't mean we can search for them? You mean we can render all of the followed persons in order of the property we chose be it name, sex, death date etc, correct?

Thnak you!

LegacyUser

Bryce Roper said: I mean you could sort your list by last name, so Allen would show in the list above Clarke. Or by Birth date in ascending or depending order. After you sort the list how you want it the search field will still work