Hi Jack,
"*I am mainly focusing on Ancestry.co.uk and ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk so any of your thoughts and experiences with these sites as both novices and experienced users would be very useful"
I haven't done your survey yet but I don't understand how anyone could compare SP with Ancestry?
Can you elaborate please on what your comparisons of those 2 sites consist of?
Could you also name other sites in your comparison list please as an idea?
Annie
Hi Annie,
I am a UX design student so, in terms of my own specialism, I am mainly looking at these sites from a web design point of view. Although context is important UX design is not primarily concerned with content but with design of the web furniture such as menus, search, navigation etc. Therefore although ScotlandsPeople is specialist and Ancestry huge and multinational the actual act of searching for records has many design similarities. Plus contrasts are also interesting, raising questions such as: does Ancestry's family tree feature make the research experience nicer there? Does the lack of Ancestry's swarms of American records make searching on ScotlandsPeople a bit simpler and more pleasant? Do credits or subscriptions make for a better research experience? This creates some interesting angles of comparison that just comparing Ancestry and FindMyPast or ScotlandsPeople with IrishGenealogy probably would not.
Best wishes,
Jack
As a specific little example of UX design for those interested/bemused:
Chinese e-commerce website Alibaba has a nice feature where as you type in your email address they offer dropdown selections of the common address suffixes to save you typing in "@gmail.com"
Now this example bears comparison to other new sign-up processes (even on websites that are fairly different)