Change of preferred spouse in landscape view is unexpected

Alan E. Brown

In the landscape view, if the root person has more than one spouse, there will be a down arrow icon by the currently selected spouse, allowing you to choose another spouse.

On the old pedigree view, this down arrow pops up a list of spouses, letting you choose a different one to view in the tree, which also changes the children that are shown. That is exactly how I expect it to work.

On the new pedigree view, the down arrow also pops up a list of spouses, and I would expect it to work the same as before. But I was surprised (and disappointed) to see that selecting a different spouse actually changes the preferred spouse (my only indication of that was a brief popup informing me that the preferred spouse had been changed). The initial spouse list popup gave me no indication that I would be changing the preferred spouse. Users unfamiliar with the concept of a preferred spouse would have no idea that they just made a choice that will have other implications for their views of this person.

I can't imagine a scenario where it is desirable to change the preferred spouse in this way. The user's intent is clearly simply to view a different spouse in the tree. Please reconsider this choice and restore the spouse selector to its previous functionality of simply changing the viewed spouse, not the preferred spouse.

Clif Bergmann

@Alan E. Brown, unfortunately for your mental model, the old pedigree view functions exactly the same as the new one, modifying the preferred spouse, just without the popup notification. The notification was added to better inform patrons that a preference change really did take place, which is a per-user setting, and does not break data in any way. Your confusion actually highlights the lack of clear communication and patron understanding concerning this feature. I am just a dev, but here's my take. The primary scenario for the pedigree views (with the exception of the descendancy view) is modeled after traditional pedigree charts, which only ever show one ancestral line and spouse at a time. "Simply viewing a different spouse" seems like a simple scenario, until you have changed spouses multiple times in a line going back generations, and have actively started working on a family that you might not even be able to find again, if we did not keep track of the selected spouses along the way. Any time you change data or settings in the pedigree views, that is the view. There is no preview.

Alan E. Brown

@Clif Bergmann , Thank you for the clarification. I had missed that the old pedigree view also changed the preferred spouse, and I certainly agree that it is much better to inform the user of such a change, so the new pedigree implementation of the notification is an improvement. This surely explains how over the years I have had multiple cases where I said to myself "I'm surprised to see that this is now the preferred spouse -- I was sure I had picked a different one!"

I understand that the spouse preference is a per-user setting. I wouldn't describe it as "breaking data", but I choose the preferred spouse for my own reasons and I don't appreciate it being changed with no advance warning. There's certainly some weirdness in the user interface for the dropdowns for multiple spouses. Those dropdowns can appear anywhere in the Landscape pedigree, but only one allows you to change the preferred spouse -- the one for the spouse of the focus person. For that one, you see radio buttons, which is a subtle but by no means explicit indication that the preferred spouse is going to be changed. All the others show a list of spouses, but selecting a spouse from the list just opens that person in the side panel. That raises some questions:

1. Since you're already showing a different UI with the radio buttons, might you consider adding a subtitle to that popup like "Select preferred spouse"?
2. Is there a good reason why I can't change the preferred spouse using the spouse dropdown for all those other places in the pedigree? The logic for changing the preferred spouse for the focus person surely applies to all the other couples shown in the pedigree where there are multiple spouses.
3. As a specific instance of question 2, in the old pedigree, where both the focus person and their spouse had multiple spouses, I could select a spouse for either of them. In the new pedigree, I can only select spouses for the focus person. Why did the new pedigree remove that option?

I would also note that although my mental model for this aspect of the Landscape view might have been incorrect, the fan chart view's implementation of selecting alternate spouses is indeed simply just a selection for that view and does not change the preferred spouse. I understand that it is a different situation, where the spouse selection doesn't affect the view nearly as drastically (it only affects the spouse of the focus person and the children by that spouse, not the entire branch), but that different implementation for fan chart is probably a factor in how I came to have the incorrect mental model for the Landscape view.

Clif Bergmann

Good questions, @Alan E. Brown. As for #1, I have passed on that reasonable request. Now, for the harder questions. #2: We do not allow changing of preferred spouses anywhere but the root node because it changes the underlying pedigree data we are displaying. It is easy to manage as the spouse of the root person, but because we expand two generations at a time, if you swap out a middle spouse, we might then be forced to update half a generation, and then have to stitch the resulting pedigree back together. It is just worlds easier to manage the data changes only at the root node. As to #3, we removed the ability to swap out the person of focus, because that would actually silently move you to a "different" pedigree (i.e. a different person). This behavior was confusing patrons, so we decided to limit the functionality to only change out spouses of the person of focus.

As to your final point, you caught me telling falsehoods! Great job! I am sure that we will be considering that exact situation as we work on updating the fanchart pedigree view as well, but I anticipate we do not change the preferred spouse in that instance because there is no other way to simply view alternate spouses.

Thanks for the great questions. Happy FamilySearching!

Alan E. Brown

@Clif Bergmann Thanks for the careful explanations. The reasons for the limitations on changing preferred spouses other than the root person do make sense, so I now understand those reasonable restrictions.