Geni

Published on 21^st March 2009 in Usability, Websites, tagged Geni.

I must admit that I’ve never been that interested in my family’s history or in the distant relatives that I might have. Simply knowing who my closest relatives are has been more than adequete and I’ve never been particularly curious about my origins. Well, at least until I discovered Geni. It’s essentially a cross between a traditional genealogy website and a social network.

Getting started only requires the most basic of information.

It initially caught my eye not for what it is, but how it’s designed. Geni’s homepage is brilliant; it has enough details to draw you in and nothing more. Only the bare minimum of information is required to register and start your own family tree, so you don’t think twice about filling in the form and clicking the submit button.

Once you’ve registered, you’re taken straight to the family tree view where you can begin to add relatives. Doing so is very straightforward and although you can add a great deal of information about them later, when you’re expanding your tree initially, you only need to enter a handful of details.

The great thing about Geni is that it’s built for collaboration. Every relative you add can have an email address and they can then be invited to join your tree. I don’t know as much about my family as my parents, but once they joined Geni, they added dozens of relatives I never knew about and now our family tree includes 80 people.

Once you have a very large family tree, it’s difficult to work out how someone is related to you, at least in the sense of traditional titles like ‘great grandfather’ and ‘second cousin’. Geni takes care of this and not only titles everyone in relation to you, but outlines the exact path from you to them.

Once you start to use Geni, you begin to discover the huge number of features it has. You can view your family in a list or on a map, see a timeline of your history, share photos and videos, edit your full profile and so on. Hiding this complexity initially and letting people explore it later is one of the reasons why Geni is so usable. Even my 100-year-old great uncle signed up and started using it when we invited him, so if that isn’t a testament to the quality of its design, I don’t know what is!