(Note: If you click on the image, you will see a larger version; if you click on the title, it will send you to the search page. You may need to flip back and forth between old and new, but this should work..)

Once you look at these, if you could let me know pros and cons of both UI’s and be specific about what you like and don’t like in these two cases, it will help me focus in on what may need to be done. The more specific you are, the more helpful it will be.

1900 Census Old Search UI example

Let’s say I’m looking for a male, surname Lynn, born between 1840 and 1850 in New York, and I know he lived Lafayette, Tippecanoe County, Indiana in 1900.

If you go to the old search interface and enter this data, you will see:

which results in :

1900 Census New Search UI example

This is the same search on the new UI:

which results in:

So what works and what doesn’t

A couple of good things that I see with the new search UI are:

1. If you pass your mouse over view image, you get a preview of the information in the record. If there are 10 links on this page, you can quickly look at them without click to each record page to see what is there.
2. You can see what is in the query that produced these records, what you choose to be exact (it has ” ” around it in the query), and you change, delete or add a parameter for your search without changing pages.