Love the work some very bad naughty programming habits cursor hungry
Greeting fellow developers. Before I start I want you to know i Love what FamilySearch is going and overall the great work the developers are doing. I am sure you are being asked a trillion different things that must be delivered yesterday. The purpose of this post is not to complain but aid to help improve. Please note my comments would have the same about a UI back in the 1970s! This is not new!!!! Its standard UI
- Pop up forms should not control the user via the cursor ! The user is in charge !!!
- I f a user has input a field completely and the field has been validated then the User does not need verify it!!! Allow the cursor to move and actually Move cursor to the next field so the user can just continue typing their input!!! e.g. locations and dates of a new person. Autofill fathers surname.
- If a user copy and paste a field for example a location the application should not make the user verify the field whence it was copied from for some very good reasons! Copy and paste should not even allow change to field that is being copying and paste anyway!!
- Popups lists of location should be have priories depending on context. Most locations for example in the UK occur before the UK was formed yet even people born in the middle ages the nearest location is at the bottom of a long pop up list which often goes before you get to the bottom and insists on taking and address yet to exist in history!
- User entering data {life blood!!!} should be taken in the user context and then translated to application context. The user should not need to know how the location is stored. e.g. If user is from the USA {user details} they should never have to type United states of America even USA or US. This should auto fill after the state has been entered. Note abbreviations are allowed for User entry but stored by the app as filled out fully to protect future . e.g. I was born in Northlants. This is how my county in the UK is refereed as! Yet family search insists I type in Northamptonshire, United Kingdom after 1801 and Northamptonshire, England before 1801. No one ever does this in the real world leading to strange entries and secondly the whether its UK or England should be autofilled by the app depending on time context. Needs to be solved in the architecture not by country level. Typos of places are not handled at all!
- Accepting GED/ GEDCOM files is great. But Not Updating fields that have not changed names and sex for example of existing people and saying its from GEDCOM annoys users that did upload GEDCOM and looks like you have invaded their space for no good reason!!
- In the pedigree screen refresh causes the screen to veer violently to the left or right! This i very annoying and time consuming for the user to find back where they working! Worse still it seems to do completely opposite 100% of time than what the user would like.
- From the pedigree screen if s user is clicked that is what the user wants! not popup that you have to click on again!
I have more but I am concerned it will not be productive. Please please please accept this observations to improve your UI , the bit how the USER perceives familysearch ! I love the familysearch concept in general. I love its free and perhaps ii should expect less. However, as a serious user with a lifetime of SW development {mosly in the sensible backend wellaway from annoying users - LOL} it would be remiss of me not to try to improve the app. Please remember ye in the bunker we do appreciate your efforts! Do send out all UI developers , architects etc to watch how the app is actually used and stop trying to force artificial work flows and data entry on the user please please please