Find A Grave has a difficult birthing process and I point some fingers

I don't need to tell anyone what Find A Grave is, or that it has a very difficult hurdle to overcome with the redesign and re-launch of its new site. 

In fact, there are so many fingers pointing at people that it is difficult to know who is pointing at whom.  In the Find A Grave forums on Facebook (the Find A Grave Forums on the site are an entirely different type of matter deserving its own time), tempers are flaring and the drama of people jumping out of the basement windows over the matter is getting too much for even someone like me who has a high bullshit tolerance. 

The launch of the redesigned web site was announced at last year's RootsTech, although it was long rumored as an outcome of the site's purchase by Ancestry.  Gone is the familiar Find-A-Grave-lavender pages and hello to a very white and bright world. 

Having worked for a tech company, I have been through conversions, and therefore I know what I am about to speak of, although it is not to be taken that I have an inside track on the goings on there.  

Therefore, This is merely my opinion.

1) Technology companies are full of left brain thinkers who think ALL end users - people like you and me - all learn alike, period.  End of discussion.  We know that they are least four types of learning skill sets, and within those skill sets there are variations.  This is how the world ended up with Esperanto, and its the reason why the world didn't embrace Esperanto.  This is why home security systems feature the ability to leave a message recording, and why 99% of people don't use that feature.   There is a wide divide between what is "Eureka!" and what is practical.  But programmers are a wiz at logical thinking and people are anything but logical.  

2) Technology companies, regardless of who they are, what they do, have a terrible track record of understanding their end users (see number 1) and they're real needs are.  This because they don't meet with real users in advance, and they don't ask real survey questions and if they did they don't want to deal proactively with what matters to the end users.  WHY?  "Because end users muck up our plans," said a Chief Technology Officer of a programming company, once. 

3) Technology companies do not deliver products that are logical progressions of the user interface that will make transitions easier for the least adaptable users.  Instead, the designers think "We'll put this over here because it makes sense to us," instead of "Where can we put this so it makes sense for the end users."  Instead, its more like "Put that over there, and people will just have to figure it out. Screw them if they can't."   (Technology companies - people, in general prefer consistency to jarringly uneven things.  Take your last hire - are they consistent and reliable, or wildly unpredictable and volatile?  See.)

OR THE OTHER SIDE OF THE EQUATION

4) Bully users dominate the End User forums and discussion groups, and that has to stop.  Find A Grave has them and they have them in spades.  Many of the screen names of the users are so taboo they aren't said aloud, in public.  What these bully users do is tighten their passive aggressive rude behaviors around the necks of people who are asking legitimate questions by verbally beating down the people who want to learn.  The standard response is "Didn't you read the FAQ's?"  And again, we are right back at the fact that not everyone learns as you do. These goons will belittle anyone to become top dog, and they are hurting Find A Grave by scaring people off.  (By the way, one of the said goons had very public panic on Facebook in one of the Find A Grave forums last week when she proclaimed something was beyond dire when it wasn't.  Had she kept her yap shut, it would have gone unnoticed.  But panicking only drew attention to her weakness and her greatest fear.)

5) "Resistance to change users" make the transition miserable for everyone.  These are the users who say "I don't understand why they had to change anything," and "I liked it the way it was."  At some point all of enter a realm in which the newest technologies simply don't make sense.  Take me - I turn fifty-five soon and I still don't, and probably never will have, a Twitter account.  I like my TV viewing to be "what's on now" not "what's on demand".  But I also understand that we don't drive Model T's anymore, we don't use Saccharine, and they don't make Black & White TV's anymore, and for good reason.  Technology has to advance and we have to make an effort to move forward with it.  

6) Users who claim to be ending it all.  These are the people who announce - in a fashion better player by bad actors in Columbia Studio's "C" movies that "I am leaving Find A Grave because they have ruined it!"  They are opening those basement windows and they are going to jump, and you can't stop them.  No you can't.  Why? Because these are adults having a temper tantrum and you can't argue rationally with irrational people. That's why.

7a.) People have to make a commitment to the new site and USE IT, damn it.  We know that Find A Grave is looking at our feedback when thing aren't working, so they need us - their loyal members and volunteers - to get in there and help them get this cleared up.  

7b.) If No. 7a is too much for you, think of it this way:  You have stumbled into a cemetery named "Find A Grave".  And you have discovered that there are lots of things that need to be corrected to make it conform to what we expect it to be.  So use the "Submit Feedback" button when you find that something isn't working.   Folks, you can either light a candle or curse the darkness - figure it out on your own. 

So, how does this get fixed?

There are two things that Find A Grave needs to do.  

First: It needs to better their mass communication efforts.  Then they need to listen, consider, and respond.   They are doing a great job of responding to people who are leaving feedback, but they aren't speaking to the greater audience and reassuring them that this will all get fixed, in time because they probably think "if we do" they concede that it was a bumpy roll-out. 

Secondly: Ancestry needs to do a post mortum on this process.  And learn from the mistakes.  Moving forward it doesn't want another launch like this.