Monday, August 18, 2014

Research Assistant Update: Disable Specific Opportunities

Last week we announced impending updates to the Research Assistant's opportunity list. Based on feedback, we made some changes to the design and released it over the weekend.

Our goal with this update was to allow users to turn off specific opportunity types. Previously, you could only turn off an entire category by clicking on the buttons at the top of the page.


Now the list of categories is on the left side of the page. When you click on a category bar it will expand to show you all available opportunity types in that category.


Click on one of the opportunity types in the category list to disable it. Click it again to re-enable it.


Click on the checkbox in the color bar to disable or enable all opportunity types in that category.


This update makes it easier to focus on the type of work that you are interested in. It also paves the way for adding many new types of opportunities, such as record hints.

4 comments:

  1. I love the new layout and custom opportunity filtering, this is a great improvement. However, I find it a little odd how far the opportunity cards stretch off to the right hand side of the screen (screen size = 1366 x 768).

    Is there any way you could shrink the cards so that they aren't so wide? It would center the layout on the screen and make the layout look a little more simple.

    Keep up the Great Work!

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    1. I've struggled with the width. This is why the list used to be 2 columns for wide screens. But now that we have the checkboxes on the left, we can't really do two columns. I hadn't thought about shrinking the width of the page so that it can't be that wide. Plus, in the future, I think we might have some more buttons on right.

      I'll think about this some more.

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  2. When I started using this, when I was on a tree in ancestry.com, there were tabs to the right of the screen with letters, I think B M D. First time I tried it I found a marriage record of relative that was great. Next time I had chance to work on my tree the lettered tabs were gone and I was not seeing Research Assistant at all. I tried variety of things including my Google settings but nothing worked. Today I found this spot and wondered if you could tell me if this was part of your changes or was I dreaming all this. I am not seeing the buttons at the top of the page you mention here. I have tried downloading Research Assistant again but could not because I had already done it.

    So how do I make this work?
    Thanks so much.
    Marilyn Jacobs

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    Replies
    1. Marilyn, we moved the "BMD" buttons from the left side of the screen into a popup that is activated by clicking the blue and orange Find-A-Record pin in the URL address bar next to the bookmark star. You can read more about it in our blog post that announced the changes: http://blog.findarecord.com/2014/08/find-record-chrome-extension-update.html

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