Challenge

Ancestry.com is the world’s largest online family history service. Since starting as a publishing company for professional genealogists, the website had grown into a huge platform supporting an extensive and unique collection of historical records (over 16 billion records and 200 million photographs, scanned documents and written stories). However, the user facing part of the service had been stitched together over many years without clear vision of overall experience and was in need of an overhaul. Ancestry also had a very passionate customer base who was resistant to change. This required a delicate approach to design process and implementation.

Sometimes I get lost… I think I probably just need more time getting experience using it.
— Karen, Ancestry.com User

Solution

I started by auditing site metrics and collecting user data to identify the key pain points during the customer journey. I then created a vision for the new site experience for key workflows (discovery, search and family tree creation) by reducing the number of steps and simplifying the interfaces. We also used responsive design in order to scale the recommendations to different devices. Then I worked tirelessly to get internal consensus and evangelize the new experience. The solution became part of the product roadmap and the core ideas have been applied to a recent update of the service.

 

Discovery

 

Recommendations


Activities & Deliverables

Research, User and System Modeling, Interaction Design, UI Design, Prototypes, Responsive Design