Preferred Marriage change in the new format
Question: Is Preferred Marriage change not possible in the new format?
I recall that in the old format, it was very easy to mark a marriage as Preferred (for someone who was married more than once). But that is not the case now.
One of my great-grandmothers was widowed and remarried. The second marriage was much longer and produced several children - and yet it s the first marriage that is marked as Preferred. I want to change it, but I see no place in the new format where that can be done. Please advise.
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I think you've found one of those new changes where things are moved, re-named, etc., but not announced. Instead of the way it was previously depicted, there is a light blue "SET PREFERRED" at the top of the "Family Members" section at the bottom of the wife's person page. I clicked that blue link and it generated a little box that gave me a choice of which marriage was preferred. Here is a depiction of what it looks like NOW (new change):
Hope that helps. Note that after you select the preferred marriage, the word "Preferred" appears with a check mark next to it above the husband.
[NOTE TO PROGRAMMERS/ENGINEERS: Please stop with the "changes for the sake of change." Moving things, changing how they're depicted, renaming them, etc., is only frustrating users. Making it harder to use because we can't find "familiar" features reduces willingness to bother using it.]
--Chris
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Being a web page designer for something as complex as FamilySearch is certainly a thankless job. They have been roundly criticized for all the very nice improvements they have made because of too much "clutter." And here in this situation where they have reduced real clutter by moving a display setting option out from every couple to just being in one spot right under the other display setting option for this section they are also being criticized.
Personally, I think cleaning up the Family Members section this way was a good change.
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The checkmark is there on one of the relationships whether you've mucked with the setting or not, although I've never been able to figure out how it chooses the default. (It's a per-user setting, but that means there's a starting state seen by users who've never visited that profile before.)
I do agree that the old "click here to put the checkmark here" method was far preferable to the current one, which requires three clicks, starting in a totally-unintuitive place (especially if you want to change preferred parents), and uses an obscuring popup to boot. The popup is movable, but the page underneath isn't, so if you forget names easily and were relying on something like the number of children or the marriage date, then you have to cancel and start again after looking. In other words, the new setup turns a simple "scroll down and look, click once" procedure into a many-step hassle: "scroll down and look, scroll up, find the pixel, get a popup missing the detail you need, cancel out, scroll down and look again, maybe take notes, scroll up again, find the pixel again, click to make choice, click to save it".
@lyleblunttoronto1, do you know if there is any chance of getting the old behavior back? As the existence of this thread (and several others like it) demonstrates, the new method is unintuitive, hard to find, and hard to use.
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I don't envision changing this back. The idea of what the preferred couple setting even does is something that generally has to be taught or discovered.
The default behavior, if you haven't chosen a preferred couple, is to show the couple with the relationship that has been edited last as the preferred. This is just the default ordering that comes from the database. A better default might be nice.
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@lyleblunttoronto1 That default selecting the most recently edited couple as the preferred, makes no sense. There are many reasons why couples' data may be edited, regardless of how many marriages may be in the list, and whether one is the preferred couple or not. Not every family makes it easy to find factual information, even when it's just from parent to child.
And unless this has changed as well, this issue would also potentially change who shows up on the pedigree chart as the parents of a child. For those fortunate enough to have entirely grown up under the same roof with their biological parents, that may seem like a logical choice. But there can be multiple reasons why it's important to someone for their "preferred" parents to show up properly in the pedigree chart. Having that arbitrarily change is less user friendly.
--Chris
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But for the comments of @Chris Bieneman Schmink I would probably still be searching for the way in which to change the preferred relationship. I couldn't have chosen a better description than Julia's "totally-unintuitive".
To me, and I'm sure many others, it is "totally essential" that the way of selecting the preferred relationship is changed - not necessarily exactly back to how it was, but so it is much, much more obvious.
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@Chris Bieneman Schmink, to be clear, the "edited last" criterion only applies to the initial, default choice of preferred relationship. If a user changes his preference, then it makes no difference whatsoever who edits what and when: that user will see his preferred relationship in all chart views. It's only people new to the profile who are affected by the most recent edit.
In fact, I wonder if part of my problem figuring out the default has been that once a user visits a profile, the preferred relationship sticks with what was checked at that time? That is, I'm pretty sure that once I look at a profile, the checkmark stays put unless I move it, regardless of who edits what.
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I'm just not understanding why so many different things are being changed. It's just that "little" things that people use reasonably often just move, disappear, change, etc. I remember the first one that really frustrated me. Suddenly the "Help" icon disappeared (and was moved, if I remember correctly - but I could be mistaken on that part). I eventually figured out that the little circled question mark at the top right corner was the replacement. What was the problem with keeping the explicit, unambiguous word "Help?" No big deal by itself, but things get moved, functions and methods change, etc. And we have no way to know what to start looking for next. We just go about our day-to-day use of FamilySearch and suddenly have a new roadblock in our way, with no warning "detour" sign to guide us. Work flow is frustrated and with enough instances of such experiences, frustration with the overall program follows.
Where is the summary as to what has changed? The changes are ongoing, there is no detailed list of what is changed and how to use those changes, and even if there was it's the "ongoing" nature that is so frustrating. We spend too much time figuring out all the changes, trying to be patient when some of those changes don't work quite as well "in the field" as they seem to on programmers' screens. We have become the beta testers by intention! Have we forgotten what happened with "New FamilySearch" and what ended up having to be done to "fix" that? The fallout continues even now, a decade later.
-- Chris
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I believe I can explain why the word "help" was replaced with an icon: internationalization. The question mark is universal in languages written in the Latin alphabet, and is used even in some languages that use other scripts, such as Arabic and Chinese. The word "help", on the other hand, is very much non-universal.
I think all changes in FS similarly have some sort of underlying reasoning, but since we don't know all of the details, we can't always guess at those reasons. Perhaps the change to the "preferred" methodology was just decluttering (as Gordon suggested), perhaps it was prompted by browser behaviors (like the move to the black notification box that's always at the top right, no matter where you clicked to trigger it), or maybe it was some combination of factors that I don't know about.
I hope the designers can come up with some improvement to the new setup that makes it easier for people to figure out. I'm afraid I'm flat out of suggestions for how to do that, if the old setup can't be used, but perhaps some information on why it can't be used would help?
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mod note - some comments were edited due to violations. Please see the Community Code of Conduct for more details.
@Chris Bieneman Schmink Have you tried using the Help Center articles?
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