Ancestry.com has navigation issues

I’ve recently discovered Ancestry.com. What an addicting past time it’s become for me. For those who don’t know, Ancestry.com is a website which provides tools and services for building and researching a family tree.

The tools and services the site provides are very good. For instance, every time a change is made to your tree, the site attempts to find additional information on the new or changed branch. If information is found, a little leaf shows up indicating as much. You can then click the leaf and easily attach new information to that person. But there is one big problem with the usability of the site: its navigation.

The site’s tools are exceptional, but the tree navigation is awkward. The initial view is fine. It’s a classic tab interface like that of the old Amazon.com. However, once you get to the tree view (which is where most of the work is done) the navigation ignores the user’s sense of space and perception.

First of all, clicking on any person on the tree takes the user to a detail of the person. This is not bad in and of itself, but now the tree is gone and there’s no easy navigation history like breadcrumbs. Now, if the user clicks on the tree view again, he is now looking at the tree from the point of view of the last clicked person-not how he left it. For example, if I am looking at my full tree, I click on my grandma; I get a detail of her. If I click on tree view again, I am now looking at only part of my tree: from my grandma back through history. To get back to the last view, I have to click on my mom, then tree view again, then me. This is very non-intuitive.

Here are the problems I see with Ancestry.com’s navigation and some possible fixes:

• Problem: Clicking on any person on the tree takes the user away from the tree
  • Solution: I like being able to pull up detail on the person, but it should be a link on the branch (e.g., “View details…”) that can be clicked. It shouldn’t be the only option.
    The default action should be that clicking on a branch should just move the user through the tree. It should navigate the user backward or forward through the tree.
• Problem: The tree view lacks backward links
  • Solution: If at any time the user is viewing the tree, if he or she is not at the newest branch, then there should be ellipsed branches to the left (or an arrow or something) that the user could click on and change his or her vantage point again-taking them into the future.
• Problem: Difficult to get sense of big picture
  • Solution: Should be able to easily and and/or scroll left, right, up, down, and zoom in and out. The functionality should be similar to that of Google Maps or Adobe Acrobat.

I don’t want to bash it too much. It really is a cool website with a lot of great tools. I just wish they’d make some improvements to the way users can navigate through their family trees.