The Family Group Screen

The Family Group screen is, arguably, the most important screen in the entire application.  This screen is where virtually all of the data entry is done and where the user spends most of his/her time.  I’ll begin by analyzing the interfaces of some popular existing software.

Family Tree Maker is the leading (or at least the best marketed) genealogy software on Windows.  The family group screen on it is, ironically, the least intuitive.  It provides extremely basic data entry functions.  You can enter information for a husband, wife, and birth, death, and burial dates/places.  You can also enter children.

Reunion 9 is the Family Tree Maker equivalent on the Mac.  Recently it has been rewritten as a Universal Binary application and has seen many improvements.  The Family Group screen in Reunion is more feature rich, allowing the user to enter and visualize more information.

GRAMPS is the open source Linux genealogy program, and the one with the most confusing and least useful interface.  There really isn’t a “family group” screen per se, but an individual screen that brings up information related to one individual.  There are advantages to this type of layout, however.  It features a tabbed interface that allows the user to quickly navigate information for the selected individual and see which areas have content.

So, what I’ve done is create a few quick mockups of how the interface might work.  These are quick Photoshop brainstorms, so a lot of the details are left to be worked out.  My main goal was to provide an interface to make sure that the user knows where there is more information to be had on an individual.  In the process, I also want to be able to show all spouses for the selected individuals and a way visualize all children related to them.  So, if Jane Doe married three times, all of her children should be displayed with all husbands (with the option of turning this off, perhaps).  I think this can be accomplished through some sort of color coding.

The first concept builds on the Reunion idea of displaying a father on the left side, a mother on the right, and some facts and children below.  This idea would more appropriately take advantage of increasingly-popular widescreen monitors and allow more space vertically to display more information.  Spouses are displayed with color codes and may be checked on or off.  This also allows some room for things like timelines or event summaries to be displayed.  Unfortunately, this takes an individual approach than a family group approach.  Events displayed here would display only for the selected individual.  Clicking on one of the spouses names would shift the darker blue background to the spouse side and focus on his/her information.

The second concept takes a horizontal approach, displayed the husband above the wife, tabs to the right of each to get to the fathers and mothers of the individuals, and spouse information at the bottom of the person’s box.  A solid colored background behind the spouse name indicates which spouse is currently active, where the active spouse’s information is also displayed.  Checkboxes could be added to show/not show children for these individuals.  There is obviously less vertical space to play with in this model.

Perhaps the best option is a hybrid between the two, since there tends to be a lot of horizontal space left over in the second approach, but I’m not sure about how much information could be displayed for both spouses.  More ideas to come later, comments and critiques very much appreciated.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 10:53 am and is filed under TreeFrog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.