Set aside an hour of time tonight to work on Beyond. I consolidated my ideas into one file and put them into a PDF: Beyond-Brainstorming.pdf. Keep in mind that this is very raw material, mostly unedited. The next step is to decide on the goals I want Beyond to achieve, which will in turn influence the guidelines I use in making design decisions (like which features are important). Some of these goals have already popped up in the brainstorming PDF, as you’ll see.

I tried to do some UI sketches but realized that I need to solidify these goals first, and I also need to get a clearer picture of what the data model is going to be like. (I’d like Beyond to be capable of historical research beyond just family history — so you can use it to research the history of an organization or a town, for example — and so the interface needs to be flexible enough to support both that and the normal pedigrees, etc.) I don’t know yet if there’s a clean, beautiful way to support both types of research in the same interface; if not, I’ll either have to ditch the historical part (which I don’t really want to do) or build two interfaces. By “interface” I mean the way you access the data (pedigree charts, family group records, lists of individuals and families, etc.). With an organization, for example, you have roles (president, vice president, committee member, etc.) that can have multiple people filling them at different times (e.g., “Jack Brown was president from 1892 to 1895; Steven Stevens was president from 1895 to 1899″). Things get complicated. Hmm, I may end up splitting the historical research stuff into a separate app, leaving Beyond with just the genealogical aspects of it. Simpler = better. I’ll think about it some more and decide later.

Technorati Tags: genealogy, software design

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