Some questions of the beginner user that feels confused about look and functionality

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21

I believe that everyone can get used to it after time.
But it not make it better.
As you advice, I went to family module and found my closest family (me, my wife ad children) and I’ve notice that there is no birth date of my daughter - so I selected her and clicked Edit - that’s what intuition is telling me - and what? Nothing - there is no anything like that.

Okay - So to change birthday of my daughter I have to go now to People, find her, click edit - select birth - click edit, oh… there is date field, but what format is correct? American, British, ISO? … Ok … there is button on side - probably date selector in form of calendar. No, this is date settings, because there may be different calendars.
Great - that all should be there, but why things you want to enter as something basic and crucial cant be done easy way?

22

Now, do you mean Gramps, or Family Tree Builder? :slight_smile:

Date fields normally adapt to your location, so in my situation, they accept the notation that we use in The Netherlands including localized month names, but you can also use Preferences to set them to ISO if you like that.

23

I don’t know if we are talking about the same thing.
If you are in Charts and want to edit the person, a double click will open that person for edit.
If you are in Families and have a family record open, there is a button to edit the each parent and a right mouse menu to edit the children. Very easy.
With regards to dates, you can enter the dates how you like. Very intuitive and flexible. I guess the most common are YYYY-MM-DD or DD MMM YYYY
I do admit that you can’t edit the family unit from the Charts view. However you can add a family unit by double clicking on a blank Mother or Father blank.

24

Of course I meant Gramps - with view plugin with All in one (or whatever) it makes big change.

25

Having been involved in developing and using software for over 30 years, I don’t believe there is such a thing as a truly intuitive interface (in the early days of Linux, many developers were fond of saying that the only intuitive human interface is the nipple).

Having never used any genealogy software other than Gramps (which I’ve been using for over 15 years), the features I use make a lot of sense to me although I am always finding other features that I haven’t tried or that were new in later versions of Gramps that I sometimes find useful. I would expect that at least some parts of Gramps would appear strange to someone coming from a different genealogical program, but that doesn’t mean that it is better or worse, just different.

In my experience, the same is true whenever a longtime user of any software package tries to migrate to a different package offering many of the same capabilities, whether it is moving from Windows to Linux, Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, Photoshop to Gimp. They are going to have more difficulty using the new package than someone who has never used an alternative package.

I suspect that I would find MyHeritage and other genealogical programs almost as unfriendly as you find Gramps as a result of using Gramps for so long without ever using any alternatives (I do use Ancestry.com as a major source in my research, but I don’t edit my tree there; I just occasionally upload a new GEDCOM file from Gramps to make searching for new information easier).

Of course, with my tree I don’t think it is possible to provide a graphical view that would include even a significant portion of my tree, let alone all of it, as I now have over 66000 people in the tree and I’m frequently adding more. I am unable to
track ancestors far enough back to determine a blood relationship with most of them, but they are all connected in some way, and some of them have multiple connections (many of my mother’s ancestors came from large families that are interconnected in various ways).

I sort of understand where you are coming from.

The first word processing/desktop publishing software my mother learned to use was WordStar. She insisted on continuing to use it until she had to move to a version of MS Windows that it wouldn’t run on, and she has not been happy with any alternative software she has tried since because none of them are WordStar. She has accepted LibreOffice to some extent, but she has never made the effort to understand the basic ideas behind it, so there are many things she still can’t do with it or she has found a hard way to do them that causes her to do a lot more work than necessary.

All of that is to say that Gramps generally makes sense to many of us that are long time users, and I’m sure it made sense to the developers
as they were working on it. (While I haven’t involved with Gramps development, I suspect the developers did many of the same things I did in developing other software, relying on their experience, suggestions from other users, and their own ideas about what they liked and didn’t like from other projects.)

The developers will likely consider ideas for improving Gramps (but remember that they are all volunteers and that you are not paying for the software), but it is also worthwhile to try to learn more about using Gramps as it is.

You may discover that the Gramps approach is actually better or that it makes it possible to do things that cannot be done in MyHeritage or other programs.

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26

Cant comment on gramps compared to others, but there is some things that is objectivly more intuitive than others, for example, Gimp is objectivly not one of them. (Havent personally used photoshop so cant comment on that). Rawtherapee is obectivly less intuitive than Lightroom.

But I know, making things as intuitive as possible without loosing features is not simple at all, especially if you dont have any experience with it. Hell, it most likely require people that dedicate a lot of time to it to come with good solution, not programmers that do GUI as one of the many things they program. I also feel open source programs inherintly draw more programmers or all around people, than it does GUI designers, compared to non open source things(there is exeptions to everything).

A lot of things can be made ways that is simple if you first know it but hard for beginners, that doesnt make it the only thing.

I would argue that editing family program from charts view is inherintly more intuitive than just using the other views, because humans are visual too. (not for everyone ofc) even tho it might be less powerfull, there is no reason why gramps cant do both. Its one of the things I want gramps to be better at. Graphs view does a better job at it than standard gramps, tho even that could be better.

Its much easier to know if something could be easier and more intuitive than it is to know how to do things about it, reason why I dont make spesific suggestions.

Coming from a person that is more willing to learn, and maybe better at, learning new software programs than the average person (ofc not everyone) If you found Gramps very easy to lean, coming from nothing, you are def not part of the “average person” when it comes to learning new software. (not to you just in general)

27

I’m an old guy now and learned about computers at the command line. Today our phones and tablets are all icon based, so I understand that many would prefer that interface.
However, the GUI interface on FindMyPast drives me crazy. It messes up the relationships so easily. Duplicates are created and there is no merge. You have to delete. But which one?
I know as a software manager how hard it is to get the interface right for the majority of the people. I have used the 80/20 rule for a long time. If you can get 80% satisfaction you are doing good, because it is costly to action that last 20%.
Yes, for a new user GRAMPS is not the most intuitive. However, if you take the time to read and understand the documents you will be a much better user.
I wish I understood day one how to correctly setup Place names and Sources. Would have saved me some time correcting the data so the features worked as designed. Still learning after 2 years.

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28

A good looking GUI doesnt make a good/intuitive one.

29

I guess I don’t like the word intuitive in this sense. For most people, how “intuitive” they consider an interface to be is more a question of how closely it resembles other interfaces they have used. That is the reason that many of the early GUI interfaces were designed to resemble the way people worked on physical desktops and are often still referred to as desktops. Almost nobody could sit down at a computer for the first time and begin using it without some instruction, which is why many people say there is no such thing as an intuitive interface, only interfaces that are easier for some people to use, depending on their prior experience.

I suspect the reason open source software doesn’t attract input from GUI designers is that there aren’t very many good GUI designers and they are able to demand high salaries from companies developing commercial software. As a result, the developers of open source generally borrow ideas from other programs that they have used or coming up with ideas that make sense to them but not necessarily to others, especially non-developers, or doing something that is easy to develop but not necessarily easy to use (it is far easier to develop an interface that works with text fields and boxes than one that uses graphics). As a result, the open source universe often ends up with multiple applications with different interfaces that appeal to different people.

For example, I personally prefer KDE to GNOME and most other interfaces while I realize and accept that others prefer GNOME. I’m just glad the choices are there and I have the option to choose what I like.

I did not intend to imply that it was easy for me to learn Gramps, although it probably was easier for me than for the average user due to my long experience using and developing software prior to discovering Gramps (fortunately for me, my users were not “average” either, most were scientists or engineers, so I didn’t have to spend as much time on GUI development as I would have for other users and was able to focus on what was beneath the hood so to speak). What I did intend to say was that it was probably easier for me because I didn’t have experience with any other genealogy software and didn’t really know much about genealogy, so I had no preconceived ideas about how it “should” work.

In reality, I am still learning new things about it and still learning about genealogy in general, and I have to go back and redo some things from time to time.

For example, the Census addons (now the Form gramplet) did not exist when I started using census forms in my data, so I came up with my own approach using notes.

I have since gone back and redone all of my census events to work with the Form gramplet. And since the Form gramplet now supports more than just census forms, my to-do list includes revisiting events based on other forms (especially draft registration forms and death certificates) that I have in my data.

Likewise, I’ve ended up revisiting all of the places that were in my database 7 years ago at least once to take advantage of changes that took place beginning with Gramps 4.0, and I will probably end up eventually revisiting many of them again as the handling of places in Gramps continues to improve, especially as I’m sure I could do better with at least some places using current features.

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30

Gramps is not the ‘pretty’ that most UX and UI designers expect today. I suspect that one reason you rarely find them contributing in Open Source is that they take a superficial look and are so overcome with Feng shui despair that they run screaming in the other direction.

The thought of the work for the necessary overhauls is simply overwhelming. That was my first reaction after realizing how much of the user documentation was missing. It still has a lot missing and there have been thousands of additions.

31

I certainly agree with this. I’ve seen so many GUIs - especially on web sites - that are very flashy and visual and are completely awful to work with. Common sense goes a long way with GUIs. But as an old boss of mine used to say, common sense is badly named as it seems to be quite a scarce commodity!

As regards Gramps, I’ve only recently come to this program. It’s not the easiest of apps to get to grips with but I have a tech background so no real issues, just a learning curve of understanding how Gramps organises things. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a program being powerful and technical, there’s space for that as there is for simpler, less technical apps, they will appeal to different users and that’s fine. If a powerful app can also be made accessible and usable for the less techy audience that’s great - but it’s not an easy feat to pull off!

As a newcomer I think the Gramps experience could be improved a bit without major recoding:

  1. Make sure it’s explained to new users up front that - even though the program “as supplied” takes care of the basics - there is a large role that is, or can be, played by add-ins/gramplets. Certainly for me this discovery was something of a surprise as it is not generally the case with apps and programs, or at least not to this extent.
  2. When I realised that the add-ons/gramplets provided a lot of functionality, I still didn’t get for a while that they can be manifested in a number of different areas of Gramps as required. So I think this also needs clearly explaining up-front. Also the difference between gramplets and other forms of plug-ins. It just isn’t enough to bury this stuff in a wiki to be found by accident. I think there needs to be a “Gramps concepts” section that the user is strongly pushed towards when they start to use Gramps.
  3. As the add-ins can play a large role I think a far more transparent, self-explanatory, way of exploring and downloading these add-ons is a must. At the moment I would say this area is rather poor: it looks slightly like an afterthought and is not intuitive. I haven’t thought this through but I am thinking that add-ins should accessed and managed by some sort of add-in “hub”. The user needs to be able to easily home in on add-ins that match what they are looking for: eg charts (down to particular types), reports (ditto), data entry (ditto, eg census, certificates…). The user needs an easy way of seeing if there is an updated version (perhaps being able to click through to the add-in’s change history). The hub should let the user see clearly and easily what that add-in does. And how it is intended to be deployed (dashboard, right pane, lower pane).

How do other programs provide help?

  • A few years ago I started using Gnucash, an open source financial app. This could be cited as an exemplar of explaining the concepts: this app has good documentation, split between explaining the basics of double-entry book-keeping and how the app is organised, and the more detailed, screen-by-screen and function-by-function help. Not knowing a thing about double-entry book-keeping the concepts guide was really useful in helping me learn how to use the app.
  • Up to now I have used Genbox for genealogy. This program is very strong in contextual help using traditional Windows style help dialogues, not pretty but it works. Unfortunately it has no mouse-over tooltips, which I think are also very useful in an app where the various fields or options are not clear.
  • I also use PhotoSupreme, a DAM program (digital asset management, ie an app for managing digital photos): this has a slightly different approach again, giving access from within the app to help documents that more conceptual-based than context based, coupled with a key that allows you to mouse over the screen to get quite detailed specific contextual help.

I hope this is useful as a newcomer’s perception.

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