This is an interesting point that we can address in the Newbie onboarding process (whether it is via embedded docs, wiki docs, or an illustrated workflow.)
Simply acknowledging that there are distinctly different expertise issues with different onboarding workflows (and pointing that out to users) is a starting point.
The Geography and Charts are glitzy pieces of Gramps that help newbies validate that they are making progress. Pretty charts and maps have a disproportionate impact in keeping users.
Charts build themselves as you assemble families. They work well with exploration.
The Geography View is a different animal. You can immediately see generic maps. But you have to do a bit of configuration before any targeted data can show up. (Perhaps there could be another built-in & default Geography gramplet that lists pins that the view WANTED to plot but could not? This includes 2 categories: Places that have Events but need GPS coordinates & another with Events that do not yet have Places defined.)
Iām not sure the issue is regarding expertise but user flow. I recently asked a family member who is a professional genealogist, why she doesnāt use or recommend Gramps. She replied:
It could be a simple issue like adding options to right-click menus, grouping categories, consistent options throughout categories or using more specific icons.
A more intuitive user flow would save time on creating & updating tutorials, documentation, FAQs and illustrated workflows for developers and increase user retention. But first it must be defined what the barriers are, to then analyse workflows that could be more intuitive for all users regardless of expertise.
A large number of onboarding tweaks are already added to the master for 5.2 release. And there are also a large number still in peer review. And even more in varying degrees of development.
Presenting these enhancements as the opening gambit in a strategic & comprehensive campaign might create new opportunities. We could present it as a challenge to the general genealogy community.
Something along the lines of: ok, weāve heard the grumbles and agreed Gramps could always be better. Take a fresh look at some of the recent changes and tell us what else could be improved. Gramps doesnāt have a salaried team of developers so the project isnāt about market-driven objectives. But our herd of cats is currently interested in stalking this prey.
^^^ That is unintentionally hilarious! Many of the complaints go back 10 or more years. The trouble is they are all so vague as to useless. A bunch of hand-waving about how there are too many input screens to do something that the writer thinks should be easier. At the bottom there are links to a series of bug reports. In only one of those could I find a specific proposal for a revised input screen. Hold onto your chair because the following was proposed as an improvement:
Honestly, I think the only viable approach to making wholesale changes to the Gramps interface is by benign dictatorship. A ācommitteeā will never be able to agree.
What might work better is a series of very short, highly focused videos. Something like āBasic Gramps in 3 minutesā showing how to create a database, enter the first person, married parents and a child. āGramps gedcom import in 3 minutesā. Etc. Donāt get bogged down in a tonne of detailāadd links to detailed docs at the end.
Easy for me to proposeā¦Iām not going to produce the video!
The split/wrap line form designs are always a mess.
Form design is an art that few people aspire to attemptā¦ and far fewer manage to master. But people have become resigned to the horror of filling out overly complex and confusing government and financial forms. (Have you looked at the 1950 census forms that Americans genealogists are excited about being released next month? They must have had to send out armed enumerators to wrest out answers to all those questions.)
I really like the DataEntry gramplet for the speed of data entry. But it would need a lot of work to ever be considered āattractiveā. And the Forms gramplet GUI is simply primitive.
Weād be a lot better off adopting some standard paper forms that have been rebuilt as fillable form PDFs and piping those fields via the Gramps form editor. A few of the forms from genealogical societies were created by professional designers or graphic artists.
