Great New Front Page

MyFamily developer, Josh Bryant, gave us this sneek peek of a big change to the front page of the 2.0 sites. If you are a member of the MyFamily 2.0 Community Site you can see a screen shot of what it will eventually look like.

NOTE: It will not look exactly like the preview in the next release

Layout

* The ‘add new content’ links have been moved into the top sub navigation bar right below the tabs on the home page. Each of these links will take you to the corresponding page to add new content or members to your site.

We’ve moved to a default 2 column layout to reduce visual clutter and better enable users to focus on what’s important.

What’s Happening

The biggest area of change you’ll notice on the home page is that the “What’s New” featured on the homepage is getting replaced.

This feature has never quite worked the way we wanted to and its been a point of frustration for many of our users. About 6 months ago we set out on a mission to improve it, starting with the basic questions of what exactly do we want the ‘home page’ to feature.

One fundamental thing we decided is that we wanted something that was focused on ‘what people are doing on your family site’ not just ‘what’s new on the family site’. This shifted focus really drives down the path of wanting the service to bring families closer together.

So after many design challenges and iterations, and countless hours of developer time … we’re finally ready to release the first version of our new home page feature: “What’s Happening”

What’s Happening is an activity listing that gives the user a quick glance of what’s been happening on their family site. It includes or will include most everything that a user does on the site today from adding photos to commenting on discussions.

We’ve also attempted to display the information with as much logic as possible, grouping together things that make sense and keeping the interface clean. We’re sure the new interface will not only be pleasing on the eye but have a deep root in usability that gets out of the way and lets you focus on what’s most important to you … the content!

A couple notes:

• * We’re calling this version 1.0 of What’s Happening. There are some things still missing, as well as some really exciting plans to make it an even better feature on the homepage … so if you don’t see something you’d like it to display, let us know, but there’s a good chance we’re already working on it.
  

• * Version 1.0 will ship without profile changes showing up in the list due to some unforeseen development issues, but the good news is we’ll have that ready to ship with version 1.1 in about 3 weeks from now.
  

• * Right now, the default display for the feature is by reverse chronological order and set to show a certain number of updates per page. Our future plan when we get around to adding preferences for the feature is to allow site admins to customize this to display any number of days OR updates … as well as sorting by reverse chronological order OR content-type! I’m sure this will be welcome news to our previous 1.0 users who have been waiting for something similar to this.
  

• * Right now, the default display for the feature is to show every “type” of update from discussions, photos, family trees, events, etc… But in the future as soon as we get preferences added, we’ll hopefully allow site admins to pick and choose which type of updates show up.
  

Welcome Message

The Welcome Message feature has moved around just a little bit to the top of the main column. It is however the same width as it was in the previous release so any custom messages you’ve created still should look okay. This will stay the same for awhile, so while we asked you to hold off on your welcome messages before, feel free to create them now in the new space.

Featured Photo

We’ve adjusted the featured photo just a bit for this release. We’ve tried to give your site content a little more prominence by moving it to the side column so it no longer pushes the main column down.

We’ve also added a semi-transparent overlay that will display the title of the photo and the author to provide the image some more context for your site users.

The photo will still link back to its own page where users can still comment on it just as before.

Member List

The Member List has gone through a bit of changes … and there’s still quite a few more to come. We’ve adjusted the layout for this release to fit into two columns but we’ll be changing this back to a list-view in the next release. This one feature will be the least-clean of all the changes since we plan to overhaul it again for next release. The screenshot below will show what we want to have it end up looking like … not what it will look like on release day.

Actions Box

You’ll noticed the list of actions that used to be in the top right hand corner is missing. We’ve decided the functionality of this box was duplicate functionality and taking up more space than necessary.

• * The ’site settings’ link has been moved into its own tab that appears on the right hand side for easier access.
  

• * The ‘change theme’ link has been removed since you can access this feature inside of your site settings page.
  

Filed under: Computers , myfamily

Myfamily.com 2.0 Free Site News

Last week Sean, GM of MyFamily.com let the members of the MyFamily Community Site in on some information concerning the free site plan in 2.0.

“We haven’t formally announced this yet, but a few weeks ago we made a decision to change the Free Site plan. We won’t be hiding your content after a year on free sites. Feel free to use your site as you normally have. In the next release, we’ll update the pages on our site that mention site content being hidden. Enjoy”

The original plan was for all photos to “expire” after one year.  Meaning to access them you would have to upgrade to a paid site.  Last week several of us had noticed sites we started as far back as December ‘06 still had old photos showing and we could comment on those items.

Filed under: Computers , myfamily

Members Can Access Non-Activated MyFamily 2.0 Sites

A few of us have recently discovered the capability of members to gain access to a migrated, non-activated MyFamily 2.0 site.   My discovery was quite by accident.  Previous attempts with the link(s) in question always took me to the 1.0 version.   This was not the case late last week when 1.0 was down for a couple of hours.  Just checking your My Sites Tab or the home page that lists all your sites will not get the same results.

What is causing a little uneasiness is once members arrive there they can post items to any section.   Of course if you don’t check them out you don’t know anyone has been there.  As we have ALWAYS been told non-activated sites would not be accessible to members. To be quite honest, I’m not sure the design team knows things work differently until we tell them.  Although another member who discovered this a few weeks back notified them…nothing was done in the following 2 releases to fix it.

I’m sure I have peaked your interest in how this is accomplished.   Remember it has to be a site your only a member, not an admin.   Go to your My Account tab in 2.0…the rest is for you to figure out.  If you are an admin who was advised to use the same method earlier in the year to see if your site(s) were migrated, you know what to do.

Happy Hunting!!

Filed under: Computers , myfamily, tips, tricks

My Second Blog

I have started a second blog that focuses less on MyFamily.com and all that entails.  Check it out here.  Feel free to check it out and stay tuned to this original blog for news about MyFamily.com.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Thought on MyFamily’s Latest Decision

Question: If you are providing a service for the public would you listen and/or read constant “whining and complaining” from your customers? How would that make you feel personally? A service you have sunk your heart and soul into. A lot of people can’t see the bigger picture of MyFamily for the steam coming out of their ears and blurring their vision. No matter what they were selling/providing the answer to the question is a very simple NO. These people think they are doing something good for the company by acting childish and now the company “giving in” to shut them up. Many of the same people cannot read the writing on the wall that 1.0 will eventually go away. It’s not an operating system it is a website/service. Even operating systems eventually quit providing support or totally do away with previous versions. More than one version of a website going at the same time forever would be ludicrous.

The following are comments I made recently on the MyFamily blog:

“Personnel changes have been happening all through this process. Most recently Sean Malone was promoted to GM of MyFamily. Dave Quick, migration guru (as he was affectionately called) is now a Sr. Program manager at Microsoft. I could go on and on because I know several names involved in this process.

A shortage of personel has been another problem.
A lot of factors can be attributed to that. The agile development process, 99% negative feedback tends to wear on folks, and the internet/technology field constantly on the move. This is the major contributing factor as to why they simply cannot comment on every little item we bring up. That would be true of any job.

….I was watching a show on the History Channel(I think) just last night. Download: The True Story of the Internet. In this particular hour they were talking about Google. The “host” said even though Google is huge and very popular they can’t afford to just sit on their laurels as technology changes. They have to constantly be looking at new ideas to keep their service relevant. Whether it be adding features such as Google Earth, Google Docs, Gmail, etc… By not doing so they would be committing technological suicide. That to me fits more closely with what MyFamily has done by waiting so long to update the site.

2.0 being unworkable is not a factual statement because it does work. If it didn’t work the whole plan would be thrown out. As we see by their public statement they are committed more than ever to making 2.0 the best family site around. We have seen several people in the programming field comment on this blog how outdated the coding and other stuff are in the 1.0 version. So things were either going to die or something had to be done to bring new life to an old way of doing things.

Besides waiting too many years to update, the only other major problem has been deciding to migrate all the sites at one time before all features were complete. These guys and gals, past and present, have done an outstanding job of trying to bring the largest “family oriented” social networking site into a new era. In the end they will succeed!!”

There may be more to follow on this subject….

Filed under: Uncategorized , myfamily, thoughts