09 March 2015

De-lightful and De-lovely

By now you are probably aware that changes are coming to the Ancestry.com website. From Ancestry's perspective these are their priorities:


Isn't it great that they finally listened to their users? I mean, haven't we all been asking for a more "beautiful" and "delightful" site? I can't wait! [eyeroll] And "usable"? Shouldn't that be a given? Apparently Ancestry programmers need to be told specifically that the site needs to be usable.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks the design team's goals are a joke. Here a few comments from a Facebook thread on Ancestry's fan page:
  • Too bad "functional" isn't one of the goals.
  • I´d really rather see that they fixed the problems, first, before creating, possibly, more.
  • how about not seizing up every few minutes, or being down entirely a lot; that would be an awesome change....
The comments on Ancestry's blog post are worth reading too. Here are a couple of examples:
  • Don’t forget that Function is the first and foremost need of the customers. All the pretty bells and whistles in the world won’t make up for the issues that customers have been encountering for several years now (system instability, phantom hints, poor messaging system, duplicate databases, etc.) Make sure those things are fixed before ever rolling this out
  • FUNCTION is the most important issue. Let’s not put lipstick on a pig.
Right now the media gallery is not functional in beta but there are plans, big plans, for a complete makeover.
"The Media Gallery makes it easier for you to manage all your media – records, videos, photos, stories – in one place to enhance the story of your family."
Um, that is different from the current media gallery how?
For years the most requested feature has been the ability to change the order of photos on a profile. If that isn't part of the coming changes the entire update will be a giant fail. All the emphasis has been on storytelling and the easiest way to tell a story is by putting photos in chronological order. As it is now the only way to do that is to upload and attach photos in reverse chronological order.
Yesterday a new site glitch made an appearance.


That's a sign that Ancestry's programmers are doing something. They've never been able to add anything without breaking things in the process.
Are you a beta tester? What's your opinion so far?


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2 comments:

  1. The ancestry beta feed back. Do you think those comments that disagree with any of the ancestry beta agenda are considered? I don't. They have a plan and those stupid customers will take it. Well, I won't. I'm not paying them any more. There ARE alternate sites. It requires work. But no more work than the NEW ancestry. I'm dumbfounded at how quickly ancestry went from a top notch research site to a scrap booking site.

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