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

Objective

Grow user base and pro subscriptions by making genealogy accessible to novice users through machine learning-generated family stories.

Key problems identified:

From this research, we found 3 core areas that the current Ancestry platform was not addressing for some users:

• Novices struggled to read historical records and understand genealogy terminology
• Users couldn't trace family trees past grandparents
• Advanced users wanted easier ways to share discovered stories

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
   • turning hard-to-read records into engaging, digestible narratives
2. Anchoring stories
   • anchoring newly discovered relatives around users' grandparents for easier mental mapping
3. Humanize lineage
   • replacing technical terms ("first cousin, once removed") with plain language ("Mary's Brother"), while still allowing full tree expansion

Outcome

Delivered a content system/pattern library reusable across other Ancestry products, including integration into DNA test result cards.