Good call on the amodality, or whatever one would call it. :) How about this: if you’re authorized to make changes, then when you hover over the fields, they get outlined, and when you click on them they turn into edit boxes (like in Google Calendar). Simple, unobtrusive, and ever-present.

More thoughts on workflow: I want to have fewer specific modes. I don’t want to distinguish between a view mode and an edit mode of the same data. So there’s a single family view, and if I’m authorized to make changes, then edit controls are visible. Part of the edit controls is a palette of individuals that I can drag from and add to the current view.

Disclaimer: I don’t actually think that an “Add person” dialog should look like this. In fact, I still don’t know what one should look like. More to come later.

Not sure of the mechanics, but what I’d like is the ability to add new individuals and link them within the same view — so when I suddenly think of someone else I want to link it, I don’t have to leave the flow of what I was doing.

Maybe that just needs to be a ‘new person’ button added to the view you have (along the bottom). The trick is to make the ‘new person’ interface come up without taking the user out of the flow of what they were doing — a popup window or overlay div in the current window?