My name is Alexandre, I’m an MSc. student of Informatics Engineering, and my thesis is focused on the graphical representation and manipulation of Family Trees (also with applications to UML class diagrams).
The program I developed, CleanGraph, is targeted at those who already work with family trees, and therefore I’m asking you for your cooperation.
This test consists of two parts, totalling about 15 minutes.
First, perform a set of tasks in a genealogy program of your choice (capable of importing GEDCOM files).
Second, perform the same tasks on the developed platform, CleanGraph.
Each of these parts has 10 short tasks (they should take about 5 to 10 minutes in total).
In the end, I ask you to answer a small usability survey with 10 quick questions, and you can also provide feedback (which would be very useful). This survey shouldn’t take more than 1 minute.
The entire test and survey are completely anonymous, and no personal data is collected.
If you have any questions, please feel free to send me a message and thanks in advance for your help!
I wish to ask for your help in this field as I see Gramps as one of the main programs in the Geneaology space and I would like to see how my visualization type would perform compared to it.
If you see that this post is inappropriate feel free to remove it, I only wish for some help in testing my project and I don’t want to undermine Gramps.
You might want to rework your test data as it skews results & brings your test results into question.
The ‘GEDCOM’ has a lot of Nonstandard extensions from My Family Tree. None of them contribute anything to the test either. And the data shown in your viewer has extra crap at the end outside the GEDCOM structure.
Although Gramps has no problem with these (beyond reporting they were non-standard & unsupported), other programs might have more difficulty. So unless the test is about GEDCOM import flexibility, you might want to level the playing field with a test file that passes a GEDCOM validation.
The idea behind the test was to see how much time people would take in some tasks in their platform of preference and compare it to how much time they took in CleanGraph. Using Gedcom was because it was the “standard”, tho gramps XML was considered.
Additionally, the program is still being developed, with more filetypes to be supported and improved layouts and overall UI.
So the issue is that the Gedcom I provided might have information in fields some programs might not find?
I passed this file in a validator, and it had no complaints, so I thought it was suitable for testing.
All the line tags beginning with an underscore (_) are custom/nonstandard tags. Meanwhile, the DATA tags are standard but … permanently ambiguous (“Pertaining to stored automated information”) and blank besides. Neither cause warnings – but they still are not vanilla GEDCOM files. And the portions where the file is ‘flavored’ creates bias towards MyFamilyTree.
Looking the file with GED-inline… of 1655 lines, 243 are ‘user-defined’
Validation report for The Kennedy Family.ged
Generated by MyFamilyTree
Submitted by Chronoplex Software
Encoding UTF-8
GEDCOM version in file 5.5.1
GEDCOM version assumed 5.5.1
Analysis time 0 seconds to analyse the file (excluding upload time)
Speed 652 records per second
Lines 1655 Number of lines in the GEDCOM file
Records 111 Number of records
Warnings 0 Total number of warning messages
User-defined 243 Number of lines with user-defined tags
Individuals 71 Number of individuals in the GEDCOM file
Males 40 Number of males
Females 30 Number of females
Other 1
Families 20 Number of families
Marriages 19 Number of marriages
Places 83 Number of places mentioned (not necessarily unique)
Source records 11 Number of source records
Charonoplex Software’s GEDCOM Validator reports: “The following valid user defined tags were detected: ‘_TITL’, ‘_STS’, ‘_UID’, ‘_DATI’, ‘_MSTAT’.”
Thanks for the explanation!
But for the purpose of this experiment, it won’t truly affect the results.
My comparison is between programs people are used to and my program, I won’t be comparing between other programs.
I would really like you to test it if you could! I had a person already test with gramps and they were faster on some of the tasks in gramps vs my program and data like that is important to me. I’m having trouble finding people that work with family trees that are willing to test it.
If you have any indication where people would like testing new programs please do tell me.
Again, my idea with these tests is compare advantages and disadvantages is graph representation for certain things in a family tree.