Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Our 23andMe DNA test results are in! And our impressions of their service . . .

Yesterday, I got back the results of my son's atDNA test. It is my first experience with this genetic genealogy testing company. I have tested in the past at Ancestry and FTDNA. And in my opinion of 23andMe - what an absolute utter mess.

The site is not user friendly (very difficult to navigate), the genetic tools, especially the chromosome browser, if that is what they call it, is non-standard and it is darn near useless.

They have loaded their plate up for all this health stuff and turned away from the genetic genealogy part of DNA testing. To add insult to injury it looks like they may have hired some of Ancestry's programmers to make their site real pretty, but like Ancestry and their "new site" the trade off is it is non-functional as a working DNA testing site (tongue firmly planted in cheek).

This experience has been a huge disappointment and as a genetic genealogy instructor I will make sure to let my students know not to utilize this service if they are interested in doing real genetic genealogy testing.

Bottom line: I immediately took his raw data and uploaded it to GedMatch (will also populate his test to FTDNA), and will wash my hands of this site, their tests, tools and company. For something that I have heard others rave about in the past, the 23andMe of today pretty much sucks and is a huge disappointment IMHO.