This morning I had a small epiphany. When you’re going through a pedigree, only a small amount of information is visible (because of the nature of a pedigree chart). Wouldn’t it be nice if the main information — vitals, perhaps a picture, whatever — was right there? I remembered seeing something like this in fluxiom, and here’s a quick mockup I threw together:

The idea is that when you click on the name of a person in the pedigree, it pulls up this info panel at the bottom of the screen. To get to the full details (where you can edit things), you’d click on the blue “More on John…” link at the bottom or click on the picture (which gives a much larger target area). And you’d be able to hide it by clicking on the “Hide Panel” link at the right. If there’s no picture, there’ll be a silhouette of a male or a female (thus taking away the need to show gender in the text).

One possible drawback is that this adds one more click to get to the individual detail page. My hunch, however, is that most of the time you’re not editing, just viewing, and if most of the information you’re usually viewing is right there, you’re fine. So to make any changes, you’d click on the More link, which would bring up that individual’s page, where you could make all your changes.

This info panel would apply to families as well, of course. Maybe even places and/or years. Hmm… The statistics may or may not stay, but I think they’re kind of fun, if only to get a more real picture of who your ancestors were and how they relate to the rest of your ancestors. Whatever the most commonly needed information ends up being, that’s what’ll be on the panel.

As for the pedigree itself, I’m still not sure how best to display it. I’m leaning towards something like Google Calendar (but probably horizontal), and yet I don’t know. It’s probably better to stay simple for now and get the basic functionality up first…

Update: I decided to revise the look a little bit. I’m still not satisfied (mostly with the tabs), but I’ll leave it like this for now.

Posted in Design
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