Separation of Details Section

LegacyUser

Sharon Lynn Young said: Why have you chopped a person's "details" section into a bunch of pieces? It makes things so much more difficult to accomplish. My suggestion is to put it back the way it was.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Welcome to the FamilySearch forum at GetSatisfaction.com!

I am not an employee, I am just another user on the system like yourself. We are told that FS employees read everything posted here although they do not always reply.

I agree with you. However:

The changes that you are talking about happened about a year and a half ago (around Sept. 2018 if I remember right). There were many, many requests just like yours. FS informed us here on the forum in no uncertain terms that they would not be reversing these changes.

We were informed at that time that one of the main reasons that they split up the pages was to improve download speeds for the pages (Some places in the world were taking long times to download a person's page). Another benefit is that you don't have to be constantly scrolling up and down on long windows with lots of data in them.

The changes they made did create many bugs, most of which have been now ironed out. A few quirks (some significant) still remain. For example, the Notes are now under a tab named "Collaboration", which is totally inappropriate and confusing.

Another quirk is that the other "sections" of the person page now exists in separate tabs, and with browsers can actually be opened in separate windows, This can be very helpful when doing maintenance on a person's record. Unfortunately, as a result you can also get the condition where if you change something in one window, related information in another tab or window may not update that information until you do a manual refresh on it. That can cause confusion and surprises as well.

LegacyUser

Sharon Lynn Young said: Thanks for responding! I have used FamilySearch daily for a long time, and for some strange reason, this software change showed up for the first time on my tablet this week. I wish there would be some kind of notification/explanation when such changes are made, instead of having the users come across a big "surprise" when they run into one of them. If I had been informed of the reasoning behind the changes, I may not have liked what was done, but would have understood, and been less dismayed when I ran across it. I was injured several years ago, and haven't been able to use anything other than a tablet since then, so maybe the changes just occured on Android. I will say, that unless there was some notification of the changes (and other similar ones), that I somehow missed, I find the attitude of having people simply stumble across them on their own, with no explanation, rather arrogant. Again, thank you very much for communicating.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: That is also a common complaint that many have which I agree with. over 40 years ago I was using systems that had a "message of the day" that always came up prominently right after you logged in. You couldn't get past it without acknowledging it. It was universally useful and effective. Notification systems today are even better. If you haven't logged in for a while, you will still be made aware of the notifications that you've missed so you can decide for yourself if they were important or not.

Dealing with these things requires concepts that have been around and well proven for a very long time.

Most people, when provided with some reason of why changes are being made will maybe grumble a bit and then bear-down and adjust to the changes. It becomes much more difficult when the changes seriously impact the workflows that you've used for years, and for a benefit that seems trivial.

So I grumble that frequently, in order to improve something, they totally revamp an entire section, breaking unrelated things that were previously working.

But that's just me :-)

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: I think, Sharon, that you and Jeff might be talking about two different things since your complaint is about something starting seeing this week.

I don't know when I first noticed this, but the details page is different depending on the width of your screen. If you have a wide enough screen, you see this:



and the Details page contains the Life Sketch, Vitals, Other Information, and Family Members.

If your screen or browser window gets too narrow, the Details page is split and you see this:



and the Life Sketch, Vitals, Other Information, and Family all now have their own tab. Basically you switch from the usual web site format to something more similar to the mobile device app format.

To fix this, just widen the browser window sufficiently. (Some people have had trouble with certain screen resolutions or when zooming in and the program thinking their browser window was narrow when there was actually plenty of room for the normal display of the information.)

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Thanks Gordon,

I normally use a large screen with my desktop, so I've not come across that behavior. It's a little like September 2018 all over again, just without as many font changes :-)

LegacyUser

Sharon Lynn Young said: Thanks, Gordon - what you described solved the mystery. I had been using a tablet with a 10.1" screen, and very recently purchased a new one with a 10" screen. The new one was fine with record attaching, but when I switched to the "person" area, the "details" section disappeared, and all the info was broken up into the various blocks. Unfortunately, I had already put the screen at it's widest setting, so now I either have to use the new tablet in a horizontal position, or go back to my old tablet for FamilySearch. Thanks again - I probably never would have figured this out on my own!

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Sharon,

Don't give up yet :-)

As Gordon pointed out, some browsers allow you to scale the contents within their windows (i.e., a "Zoom Out" function). If you already have your browser window as wide as your screen will allow, you might only have to scale the browser window CONTENTS down by something less than 5% in order to get that expansion that you were used to to come back. Check out any scaling capabilities that your browser may have.

Note (also as Gordon has pointed out) that you could also probably do this by setting the resolution of your screen higher, but you would probably find out that the adjustment for this is too coarse and your fonts would become too small. Furthermore it would be that way for EVERYTHING, even things on your basic desktop. Scaling down just the contents within the browser window is likely the best approach to try out.

Also note that some browsers that allow this type of scaling also allow you to define the scaling for specific areas of the web. In other words you could set the ever-so-slightly reduced size in the browser window for everything in the FamilySearch website, but all other websites stay at 100%.