The items in the right-click on a couple menu apply to only the “Father”. Basically, it is the same menu that you get when you right-click on a person in the other views. One improvement would be that right-click on the “Mother” cell would make the menu actions focus on that person - that would remove the misogynistic attribute. A further improvement would be to add to the menu a link to the FGS report for that couple.
In a sense, I think you are clicking on a couple rather than on a person. You get the same result whether you click on the Father person or on the Mother person. You can sort on the Father column or the Mother column by clicking at the top of the column. Having done sort, clicking anywhere in the couple affects either the Father person or the Mother person depending on which column is the sort column. So Couple View is not always tied in just to the Father person.
There is no visual indication at the top of the column which column is the sort column. You can usually figure it out easily enough by looking down the list of couples. But I think the top of the column needs a visual indicator. And I think that both ascending and descending sorts need to be available. At the present time, only ascending sort is available.
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Another UX gotcha! moment. In my wee test database, the sequence of couples does not change as a result of clicking on the header. And how unintuitive is that to right-click or double-click on one name of the couple and get menu items that apply to the other person instead? Shouldn’t the pop-out menu either present individual actions for both or give the choice of individual before or after selecting an individual action if the right-click menu cannot be made sensitive to which spouse of the couple was clicked?
And this Wiki sentence illustrates how silly this UI is:
If you double click or press Enter to edit a person, RootsMagic will edit the person based on the currently selected sort order.
There is neither “sort order” (i.e. ascending, descending) nor sort key (highlighted heading or column background or bolded names) displayed.
So it’s not misogynistic. Just poor UI design leading to a poor UX even for a relatively competent user like me. I note that there is a pretty consistent lack of sort column identification and order elsewhere in the app and, actually, a number of places where there is no column sorting available and there should be.
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TomH - I have to agree with you. Often times the UI design in RM8 is baffling and leads to a very poor UX. The beta testing for RM8 seemed to focus more on error identification than on user experience. My favourite pet peeve in RM8 is the inconsistent use of navigation hints e.g. “>” where you never know whether clicking on a field will open a new screen or if you have to navigate way over to the actual “>” to get to the entry screen … to say nothing of the lack of initial indications whether a field has a drop-down selection or not. These are pretty fundamental issues that should be fixed during usability testing (or better yet never be introduced in the first place by adhering to basic design principles).
I have noticed this issue with RM8. I found it very disconcerting in the beginning and I still do.
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I agree 100%. I would like to sort the Place List according to the number of details entries, and I could also see using sorts by Latitude and Longitude. I would like to sort the Sources List according to the number of citations and the People Index by birth or death date. There are other examples but ideally bi-directional sorting should be built into every column in every table.
It’s not even possible to work around this issue by selecting all, copying, and pasting into a spreadsheet program for sorting. If sorting is not to be made available, and exporting a table into .csv format is not to be made available, and saving the table in .docx or .rtf format is not to be made available, then at least the select all option should be there.
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