Should categories be moved to the bottom of profiles?

Question

Ed Burke has suggested that we move the categories from above the biography to below it, or to the very bottom of the profile page. This would be more like how Wikipedia does it.

We were planning to set the categories apart somehow, visually. They currently blend in with the other info near the top of the page.

I like the idea of moving them to below the biography. But some people wanted to emphasize them more, not less.

What do you think?

Comments

September 2013 Update:

Today we moved the categories so that they're more visible. They now appear directly above the biography in full-sized text, instead of grouped with the small text for the profile manager, last edit, and number of visits.

If categorization interests you, join Gail Cox in the Categorization Project.

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This is a great help. Thank you, Chris.

Answer 1

Wow!  Just imagine!  Categories now have their own special place on profiles.  They are no longer hiding in the small print at the top. Thanks to Chris for making this happen!  You the MAN!

For an example you can look at my profile:

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Irvin-110

Now it is time to add categories to your profiles.  I made a short tutorial on how to do this.  You can find it on my google docs here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kldIgrdwKVqaXh9LLRLCuMAeXdm_YhxXKYQALCWREnA/edit?usp=sharing

You'll find lots of help here if you ask!

gail

Comments

While I'm happy to see greater visibility for Categories, I'm sorry to see yet more space taken up before the narrative. I paste below Brian's suggestion, which I think deserves consideration:

Another potential option that might work regardless of how many categories are used is update/revise the sidebar. Personally I have always felt like the side bar was awful wide and sometimes made it difficult to get a good sense of what the profile was and what was "additional" stuff. If we made the side bar smaller and moved all the profile manager, HSA, Category, photos, even maybe the summarized profile data, etc. to the side bar I think it would be much cleaner to look at and use. Something maybe reminiscent of what some wikis do but it would not necessarily have to be that detailed. You would have spot for the profile photo maybe, with the personal information under that, HSA tags and other tags under that, category information below that, a photos section below that, etc. This would allow all the profile information to be highly visible and all the quick reference/index information to be located all together on one or the other side of the screen.

I suggest this also as I hesitate to put anything clear at the top or clear at the bottom of the profile. Mainly if you put things at the top it clutters everything up and if you put it at the bottom it may never get looked at or used especially with some of these really long profiles. It may be too much stuff to put in a sidebar but thought it might be worth suggesting.

commented Oct 31, 2012 by Brian Chelton G2G5

     

 

 

 

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Much better looking categories !

I also llike Brian and Jilliane's idea of narrowing the sidebar because it will make the narrative /biograhy section look better but please do not put categories on the bottom.

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I suggest a narrower right-hand column in the following order:

1. [Project Protected Profile tag if present-- and smaller]

2. Profile Managers

3. Categories

4. (Communication options)

Answer 2

I would agree to emphasize more and keep at top. Perhaps a blank line before and after. Another option to perhaps rearrange the order of these items.

Died

Categories:

Profile Managers:
Last profile change on 30 October 2012
This page has been accessed ???
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Comments

Thanks, Mike. I suppose one factor here is how many categories a profile is likely to be included in. If it's a dozen or more, I don't think they belong at the top. There's a discussion in http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project_talk:Categorization right now about the basic philosophy for categorization, initiated by Gail Cox. Maybe we should see how that plays out before making any design changes.

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Another potential option that might work regardless of how many categories are used is update/revise the sidebar. Personally I have always felt like the side bar was awful wide and sometimes made it difficult to get a good sense of what the profile was and what was "additional" stuff. If we made the side bar smaller and moved all the profile manager, HSA, Category, photos, even maybe the summarized profile data, etc. to the side bar I think it would be much cleaner to look at and use. Something maybe reminiscent of what some wikis do but it would not necessarily have to be that detailed. You would have spot for the profile photo maybe, with the personal information under that, HSA tags and other tags under that, category information below that, a photos section below that, etc. This would allow all the profile information to be highly visible and all the quick reference/index information to be located all together on one or the other side of the screen.

I suggest this also as I hesitate to put anything clear at the top or clear at the bottom of the profile. Mainly if you put things at the top it clutters everything up and if you put it at the bottom it may never get looked at or used especially with some of these really long profiles. It may be too much stuff to put in a sidebar but thought it might be worth suggesting.

Answer 3

I think the side bar is needed but i think that should be moved most of my profiles look oddly side heavy already and i have alot more sourcework to add... just a thought. As far as the biograpy sources i think thats a centering issue... whichever way its done it should be centered whether top bottom or middle. Or side bars bothsides everything else center?

Answer 4

So have been thinking about this off and on since the question first came up. I have another thought for making Categories more visible and hopefully useful for people. Would it be possible to put categories in a "cloud" format somewhere on the page? I know some of the category names can get kind of long (I am a bad one for this especially with churches, schools, etc) but I feel as many others have mentioned that they get lost or just look like one big blob of text (like on my profile) at the top of the page. A "cloud" format might be more visually appealing and make it more prominent which should encourage adoption and use. Just a thought.

Comments

Hi Brian. This wouldn't be an easy change. Plus, if you mean one of those word clouds where the size of the word depends on its frequency in the text, I'm not sure how we would implement that, i.e. which categories would be bigger than others. Most likely, any approach we took would be difficult and resource-intensive to implement.

Answer 5

Was looking through some old G2G comments/questions and came across this. Thought I would give it a bump and see if there is any further discussion/ideas and where things might stand.

Comments

Thanks, Brian. I was just talking to Ed and Lianne about this at RootsTech a few days ago. I brought it up because I was hoping there would be an easy consensus on where the categories would go. But instead it turned into a discussion that parallels the above, i.e. maybe the bottom, maybe clearer at the top, maybe in the right column.

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I figured the word cloud was not feasable but was wondering if any consensus had been reached otherwise. Looks like that is still an ongoing discussion.

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It's the classic problem (for me) of the scope of something snowballing. One idea for a change leads to another idea for a change leads to another. We want to make a small adjustment to the appearance of categories, but that leads to a reconsideration of the entire layout of the profile. :-)

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I can only imagine. You guys do great with what you do accomplish given all the "feedback" I am sure you receive. I can barely keep up with what I see on the Supers page let alone the other sources that our out there.