The Footnote team and special guest Dick Eastman will be in Arizona March 18-20, gathering feedback on Footnote. The team will visit people in the Mesa, Tempe, and Scottsdale areas.

We are looking for volunteers who are willing to let Dick Eastman and six Footnote employees into their home for an hour or so to ask some questions and observe how they use the site. Visits like these provide great feedback for us as we try to improve the site experience for our members.

If you live in one of these areas and are interested in being a volunteer (whether you use the site every day or have never used it before), please contact Elizabeth.

We will be hosting a meeting of Footnote.com users at the National Genealogical Society Conference in Richmond, Virginia on Saturday, May 19, 2007 at 10:00 AM. Footnote users who live near Richmond or who will be attending the 2007 NGS Conference, are welcome to attend. We will discuss future plans, solicit user opinions, give out door prizes, and have fun with Dick Eastman and Beau Sharbrough. Anyone who is interested may attend. Seating will be limited. If interested please contact Elizabeth.

We are looking for volunteers to “test drive” the website on Thursday March 29th. We are looking for eight volunteers who are 40 years and older. This usability research will be extremely valuable to the team here at Footnote as we continue to make improvements to the site. The research usually takes only about an hour. In exchange for your time and valuable feedback all participants will receive a $25 gift certificate. The research will be conducted in Lindon, UT. Interested volunteers should send an email to eliz@footnote.com.

It just got a little easier to find what you’re looking for.

Now you can see where your search terms appear on a document, say The Pennsylvania Archives (free), right on the search results page.

Rolling your mouse over any of the highlights in the thumbnail will show you a enlarged view of the word to help you quickly evaluate the document.

This feature is available on both free and premium documents where text matches can be found.

In the viewer, you can quickly toggle the highlighted matches on or off.

For those interested in a little hack. You can edit the URL at the top of your browser to highlight matches for other words as well. Just change the word next to “query=” found at the end of the URL.
Be aware that finding words in printed text (commonly referred to as “OCR”) is not a perfect science especially when that text is blurry or warped.

For those who enjoy sharing their research and stories with Pages, you’ll be glad to know that you can now reorder your entries with a simple drag-and-drop.

To reorder do the following:

1. Click “Turn on edit mode” button
2. Click “Reorder entries”
3. Click and drag the entries into the order you want.
4. Click “I’m Done”

Leave us a comment if you have any suggestions or things you’d like to see on Footnote.

Thanks.

We’re back in the office, making sense of what we learned and making plans to improve the site. I wanted to take a minute to thank everyone who made our California road trip such a success.

First, thank you to everyone who let us into their homes. It’s quite an act of faith to let a herd of people you don’t know come into your home and look over your shoulder while you work.

Without exception, the people we met with were competent, intelligent, helpful and, on top of it all, very nice. Their thoughtful feedback really helped us understand some fundamental things about the site, and what we can do to make it better.

Thanks to Dick Eastman for all his work to help us find the right people to visit, for providing the level of trust those people needed to let us into their homes, for bringing Wanda, for his insight during the visits and for being fun to hang out with. Poor Dick had to go straight from these visits to a cruise. We wish him every success at the shuffle board and the buffet table.

Thanks also to the folks from the office who could not come, but helped in so many ways: Making arrangements for the trip, making real-time fixes to the site during our visits and making the sacrifice to stay home so that things wouldn’t come to a complete halt while we were gone.

Thanks to our management team for supporting all our efforts to make a site focused on meeting the needs of people who use it.

Here are a couple more pictures from the trip, just for fun.