Findmypast (FMP) recently changed their website from one that was very intuitive, and easy to use and read, to one that is approaching unusable.
The fundamental mistake that FMP made was not running the new site in parallel with the old site whilst they ironed out the problems.
This has caused a huge uproar from many of its users and a great loss of trust in the company.
The layout of the webpages is extremely poor with large data entry and data display boxes with only small font text inside them. This means that any page you look at is very spaced out and spreads over many screen pages. You will find that you will soon suffer from RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) from all the scrolling up and down you have to do.
It is the sort of design style you would expect to find in the Ladybird series of infant reading books. I'm not joking!
The data entry fields are often wrongly or confusingly named and sometimes even don't have a title. As an example, the current search form for England Births has two fields for the year. One is titled 'Birth Year' and the other is titled 'Year of Birth'. I have yet to discover what the difference is and why FMP feel you need both.
This current version of the Births search form is the latest, 'improved' version that FMP have been working on for several weeks.
Because of the way their new search works, when you do manage to enter any data, the results are often zero, or run into tens of thousands, requiring a lot of filtering to narrow down to a manageable number. This means that there is a great danger of losing a result you may want because the filter removes entries that, unknown to you, may be mis-transcribed.
The results you eventually come up with are poorly displayed, being very spread out requiring lots of scrolling. RSI again!
In addition, the line length as displayed is very cramped. For example, in census search results, any surname that is longer than 8 characters has the 9th, 10th, 11th, etc characters wrapped onto the next line making reading difficult.
With long place names like Warwickshire the last couple of letters overlap the column to the right and you end up with characters literally on top of each other. Impossible to read.
In many cases crucial information is just missing from the results. For example, thousands of census transcript search results have no first names on them.
Over the years, using the old site, users have frequently suggested corrections to the transcripts when they have found mis-transcriptions from the original images. These corrections (which must be tens of thousands) were updated regularly on the old site. It appears that very few of these corrected transcripts have been included in the new database. So a lot of the transcriptions you find are now wrong.
To be fair, FMP say they are working hard to correct all the problems. But, reading the submissions on the two main Facebook pages ('Findmypast' and the alternative 'Can't Find My Past') I get the impression that FMP themselves are completely overwhelmed by the challenge of the vast number of problems they need to fix.
FMP have recently said that. "There are millions of records exclusive to findmypast that you can't find on any other family history website,..."
I think it would have been more accurate to say. "There are millions of records exclusive to findmypast that you can't find".
In conclusion I would recommend that you don't spend your money on a subscription to Findmypast until either they return to the old site or get the new site working in a way that is usable and trustworthy. Unfortunately I think that might be a very long way off.
