TL;DR

Led design strategy to create an experience that focused on novice genealogists to uncover their family and the stories they have. By leveraging machine learning and design to meet people where they are, we created a product that provided engaging stories and surfaced family members users might not have discovered given their lack of experience with genealogy. Creating a pipeline that increased the user base and subscriptions in the pro products.

Team

UX and design strategy: Lee Jones

Visual Design: Charlie Tran and Lee Jones

User Research: Andrea Ucar

Product Manager: Caity Selleck

Core Objective

To create a pipeline that increased the user base and subscriptions in the pro products by createing an experience accessible for novice to moderate genealogists, that allows users to be inform them about their ancestors’ lives without a background in geneology.

Previous Design

Concept testing had already been done on the idea to understand user appetite and if there was a core group that could benefit from such a service. The concept took notable U.S. historical events and told users if the data they input linked them to a person or not, through a machine learning model that cross-referenced data input by the participant to user-generated public family trees that existed on the platform.

Users expressed a high level of interest in an automated delivery of family stories; engagement is highest in users who receive a notable story.

• “This is incredible! I have ancestors who were on the Mayflower? Could you tell me if I have ancestors who were Salem witches?”
• “This information is so valuable for me to be able to work on my family tree.”

Audience and Problems

From this research, we found 4 core areas that the current Ancestry platform was not addressing to some users:

• Beginner to novice users were not sure how to read historical records.
• Beginner to novice users did not understand the language of Genealogy.
• Beginner to novice users were not being able to build their family tree back past their grandparents, in most cases.
• Advanced users wanted a way of sharing the stories they see within records with their family members.

My Role

My role on this project was to bring in design thinking, explorations, and design exercises to help the team align on what a product might look like and how we might address these problems for our users.

My role was also to help set direction and strategy on how we could address user needs through design.

Setting design foundations

Jobs to be done

The first exercise I conducted was to do a “Jobs to be done”, exercise where with a simple prompt the team could list all of the ways a job could be done to achieve an outcome. This exercise was to help us identify all the ways this problem could be solved and where the gaps were that could solve to help a person solve their objective.

Once, we had them all listed we organized them and used a redlight coding system to understand which options our team was positioned to tackle and which ones were outside our realm or were being handled by a different team already. This was important to help ground us in our core mission and how we could possibly deliver that, while also identifying existing product teams at the company we could potentially partner with.

With all areas that were identified as problems, we could solve, we prioritized them based on feasibility and impact based on our current understandings.

Alignment on Concepts

Next, we did concept theming, a word exercise to create a common language and align on the concepts. This was to help align us on what we thought we were doing. The idea here was to create a common language and align on the concepts everyone had so we all had a common understanding when talking to each other.

Design principles

This concept theming work was used to create our design principles, which we used to evaluate our solutions.

Design focus workstreams

Based on the problems that we had identified and our understanding of where we would be operating we developed 3 key areas to focus on.

1. Creation of stories
   • Why this is important?
     • One of Ancestry’s key selling points is its catalog of records and research showed that novice users have trouble reading those documents be that because of handwriting, the purpose of the doc, etc.
   • What this would accomplish?
     • Stories give context to the data in the records and help personalize the records.
2. Organize stories
   • Why this is important?
     • Depending on the person they may have a few to many stories based on what the system finds and sends to them. They needed a way to navigate these stories.
   • What this would accomplish?
     • Give organization, so users can reliably find the stories they want to engage with.
3. Humanize lineage
   • Why this is important?
     • Research has shown that novice genealogists don’t understand terms like, “First cousin, once removed”.
   • What this would accomplish?
     • Using nomenclature that is more ubiquitous helps to humanize and make people more relatable.

Design sprints

Based on these 3 areas I organized a one day long design sprint that was aimed at generating ideas around the focus areas that were identified.

This exercise was a colsolidated version of the Design Sprint method developed by Jake Knapp, where we with the help of Design, Research, Product Managment, and Engineering we explored answering critical business questions through design. Which are then turned into quick prototypes and tested for validation from users.

Design Solutions

1. Stories’ creation workstream

This workstream focused on the one hand taking the historical records of everyday people which were rich in information but hard to interpret. The plan was to turn these into engaging stories that could be digested easily by readers while teaching and helping to decipher the record.

On the other hand, it meant creating compelling stories about notable figures that someone may be related to.

Example of story format, Q1 2020.

2. Organizing stories workstream

After many variations we found that organizing family members and stories by grandparents helped orient users to the newly discovered people in their family. This offered a cognitive model that easy for people to map the stories and people in their family back to themselves.

3. Humanizing Lineage workstream

Through research we found that using more colloquial language, like “Mary’s Brother”, helped novice users understand the relationship to themselves. Instead of using language like “5th great uncle” or “first cousin twice removed”. We also simplified the UI, focusing on the key data points, to only show the direct lineage which helped to orient in terms of generations. We still allowed for the expanding of the full tree view in case people wanted a more in-depth view of their tree.

Conclusion

We developed a content system and pattern library that lends itself to meeting people where they are with their understanding of genealogy. While, providing ancestors that people might not have found otherwise and giving them some interesting stories that can take back to share with their family. The system also lends itself to be shared and inserted into other solution Ancestry has to offer.

Reflection

We met our team goal of creating a product that was engaging to novice geneologists and got them excited about their family. We also created a design system and codebase that could easily be integrated into other features and surfaces at the company.

Design of StoryScout cards integrated into DNA test results.

However I learned, focusing on problems people may have with a service alone can sometimes result in minimal revenue increases. The solution did not convert as many people to paid customers as hoped, initially. Concessions need to be made to meet business goals (e.g. the max number of stories a person can receive or making StoryScout part of the setup experience) while creating an experience that is helpful to users and that they want to use.

One of the major learnings we had as a team is that people are really excited to learn about their heritage if it is approachable. Since people are excited to learn about their family anything shown or written can be taken as fact. So being clear that images are not representative of the person mentioned is very important.

I also learned genealogy is a very specific hobby and interesting in the fact that not everyone can participate in it. The system we created didn’t allow for none “none traditional” family structures. Focusing solely on traditional family structures and historical records have their limitations, which makes it difficult to create an inclusive experience. Exploration and flexibility should be done to focus on “found families” and recording family history through moments in the now, in addition to official records.