I have spent some time manually entering people. In general, I think the current UI is very clean, but I have a couple of suggestions:
1 - Adding a father via the pedigree page - It would be more convenient if the Last Name field was prepopulated with the last name of the person you are adding.
2 - I think it would be more intuitive if the forms for editing a profile were about the same as the ones for adding a new person. I noticed this after typing the wrong birth and death dates for a new parent, then finding that the flow for editing the profile was very different for updating those same dates.
2a - the use of radio buttons for replacing the existing data was not clear to me right away either (I confess to not watching the video first), but once I figured it out, it seemed natural. Something tells me that the radio buttons will be very useful when you are merging in new facts later on.
When you are adding a person from the Tree you have essentially a 2 step wizard (I am not counting the greyed out Relationship step):
1 - Name, Gender, and Status
2 - Birth, Death, Marriage
When you edit a profile, you get
1 - Name
2 - Gender
3 - Birth
4 - Death
5 - Photo
6 - Cover
I think it would be nicer if you combined 1&2, and 3&4 and use the same form design as doing an add. The benefits are consistence and less clicking.
I see what you mean about it being confusing. The challenge is when you edit a person, another way to get into the edit dialog is by clicking on the name, birth, and death in the profile header, which takes you directly to the name, birth, or death tabs, and I like that. If we were to combine birth and death together, then if you clicked on death in the profile header you would have to scroll down past the birth.
I could combine the name and gender tabs. I’m not sure how useful that would be.
Another alternative is to modify the “Add a new person” dialog to make it more different from the “Edit person” dialog so it’s less confusing. I could move the birth and death dates from the third tab into the second tab and put them under name and gender.
I did not realize the other path to these fields. I personally tend to like fewer clicks because when you get into larger trees, or you are making a lot of updates, it slows you down. However, I do understand that many people are better served when it is simple.
So, Maybe you could combine Name and Gender onto one. Gender doesn’t get changed very often, so putting it with the name would save a whole tab.
You could leave the others as is. When you go to a broader beta you could see if other people would like something like the Quick Edit dialog that Ancestry provides (under the edit menu). It lets you change name, gender birth and death date & location quickly. .