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Thursday, November 7, 2013

New Contextual Help in Beta for FamilySearch Family Tree

A Beta Version of the FamilySearch.org Family Tree is presently under development to add contextual help to fields on an ancestor's detail page. This is a more direct method to add help to programs and works especially well with FamilySearch Family Tree. The Beta Version can be found at:

https://beta.familysearch.org/tree/#view=ancestor&person=LDLC-MNZ

Here is a screenshot showing the contextually related help screen associated with the "Life Sketch" section of FAQ WIKI Person Male example. This development is in the very early stages and the developers are looking for comments on the usefulness and the functions of this proposed system of help. You can let them know by commenting to this blog post.


You can click on the image to view it at larger size and read the explanation of the program. It is not yet certain if and how this system will be implemented. Likely it will be available in the "Get Help" link at the top of the page. I have suggested that the help be added to each section of the detail pages of Family Tree so the information is readily available to the users, but this may not be possible.

I certainly welcome this development. You can get to other help menus simply by clicking on the information in each field of the detail page. For example, clicking on the "Name" field shows the following:


This is the type of addition that would substantially increase the utility of Family Tree. Please leave your comments here to this blog post and they will then be available to the Developers. Making comments is time sensitive and if you find this post after the end of 2013, I suggest that you see if there have been updates to Family Tree before commenting.

1 comment:

  1. This is an independent development effort led by the user community in an attempt to bring a rapid deployment model of context sensitive help to Family Tree.

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