New Feature Idea: Collapsing and Expanding Residences
💡 New Feature Idea: Collapsing and Expanding Residences
Hello Community. We've received so much great feedback from you all over the last few months. We hope you will continue to help us out as we try out new feature ideas for Source Linker.
The Problem
One of the team's toughest challenges while creating this new experience has been finding ways to reduce some of the vertical spacing and scrolling throughout the page. Because we operate using a defined set of design and development guidelines (our design system at FamilySearch), there are some elements of the design that require more spacing in certain areas and less in others. The result of this is that there is more vertical space and scrolling as compared to the old Source Linker experience.
With that being said, we'd love your feedback on an idea that we believe will help reduce scrolling when a tree person has a large list of residences.
Collapsing and Expanding Residence Lists Idea
When a user lands in Source Linker, they may see tree persons that have a large list of residence facts. To view all of them or the information below them, the user must scroll down the page for a while, lessening the efficiency while using the tool.
To solve this, if a user sees that a tree person has more than one residence fact, a link with a down-arrow icon will appear that says "See more residences" below the last residence fact. When the user clicks this link, the list of all residences will expand.
The user will then see a "See less residences" link below the very last residence fact in the list, which when clicked, will collapse the list back down to showing the single residence fact from the record.
This interaction will occur whenever the user has clicked the "Compare" icon and sees the tree person with multiple residences, or in the case where the user clicks the "Details" link and sees that the tree person has multiple residences.
Again, we are hoping that in the case where a user has a large list of residences displayed instead of scrolling a ways to see the other sections of Source Linker, they will be able to collapse that section for convenience.
To Try Out
*Note: This involves a clickable design prototype. Clickable prototypes are not live on the site. You won't break anything by clicking around on it
- Access the clickable prototype here: Explore Residence Collapse/Expand Feature
- In the Source Linker screen, click the "Compare" button on the person Richard Willey (Son).
- Under the residence fact, click "See more residences (7)".
- Under the last residence fact in the list, click "See less residences".
Key Insights We Want to Learn
- Will there be value in this feature for all users?
- How did the animation feel?
- Will this reduce tedious scrolling? Or is scrolling not that big of an issue?
- Did the overall interaction make sense?
Thank you again for your help with this. Please leave a comment below regarding your thoughts on this feature idea.
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Grammar tweak: "See fewer residences". Pretty please with a cherry on top.
Will there be value in this feature for all users? Obviously not: if most of your ancestors are from a place where the available indexes on FS don't mention residences, then you might see a profile with more than one residence about once in a blue moon. Will the availability of this feature negatively impact you? Absolutely not. You won't even notice.
However, what you write about needing to fit into design guidelines is ...worrisome. Is that why Source Linker doles out information so grudgingly? (I know from a decade of experience that that baptism is 100% guaranteed to already be entered, under Christening where it belongs, regardless of what Source Linker does or doesn't show me about it. I was hoping the new Linker would fix this, but it hasn't.)
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2) The smooth expansion/contraction part of the opening/closing animation is fine. The jerk at the end when whole screen jumps is a bit annoying, particularly when opening the list since the first thing I would want to do is start at the beginning and scroll down. With the jump I have to re-orient myself, scroll back to the top, then start reviewing. I would do away with the jump. (I am assuming the sideways motion is an artifact of the prototype screen and would never appear in a production version.)
3) I personally don't find the current need for scrolling that big of an issue
4) The interaction makes sense just fine, except for the grammar correction needed that Julia pointed out.
1) I have concerns. What triggers which single residence shows? A match of the year? A match of the place? What if the residence in the source doesn't match any of the current residences on the record and it can be added? Will none of the residences show? Will all of them show? Will one random one show?
I find that too many people, at least with the records I am working in, already just ignore the residences, pull everything from the left to right, attach the source, and go on their merry way without evaluating what they have done. Hiding all the residences won't make this worse, because it can't get any worse, but it removes an opportunity for them to maybe someday learn to do better.
Here is an example I came to yesterday in which another user attached a bunch of birth records. In this particular collection, the child's birth place is indexed as the mother's residence and is available to be pulled from left to right on the mother's record to add it to her profile. These have been indexed as a single word so the auto-standardization routine has a lot of fun with them. I corrected all this already so the images are from the beta site.
Here is the mother's record after this other user was done attaching sources and had gone on to other things:
These needed to be corrected to the proper places, properly standardized, and combined to be the four places they were instead of these seven if they were to remain here. Personally I just record them as the child's birth place on the child's profile and delete them from here.
Since the source linker shows the linked standard, not the displayed place name, these residences appear in the source linker like this:
These are all incorrect, some of the them horribly so. Assuming this new function in the source linker hid all of these and the person attaching a new source had no reason to open the residences, the new feature would rob that person of a chance to realize the residences on the profile needed work.
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This change would be of no value to me. I don't mind the scrolling. In fact I like to see all the residences, and this would just require more clicks to do it.
Often, FamilySearch users don't put in the residence when they attach a census or other residence source. Maybe seeing other residences would help encourage them to do it!
I also think that showing the residences helps to determine if this is indeed the correct person to attach to. If the new residence is way different than the others, you should wonder.
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I do not see that collapsing the residence names would gain much if it only appears in the compare names function. It can already be collapsed on the person page under Other Information.
Where the scrolling is more cumbersome is when you have an obituary. The indexed source may show 15 people on the Others on Record category. It is difficult to drag the name to the correct position (sibling, child) because the position where they belong is showed higher on the page. This was particularly hard on a laptop using the track pad, when no mouse was available.
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Thank you all for your feedback. We can see how it can be important to display all residence information as it helps in making more accurate decisions when deciding if this person is that person. We will continue to think about this feature and the value (if any) it brings.
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The key to minimizing scrolling is to have the list of residence descriptions on as few lines as possible. Don’t be adding more spread out formatting or box margins.
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