Challenge

Ancestry.com subscribers have a fundamental desire to understand who they are, where they come from and are interested in discovering, preserving and sharing their family history. After many home visits to our users, it became clear that the service makes it difficult to share and collaborate with other family members. Many of our users still store their photos and clippings in the shoebox and don’t know what to do with them.

Solution

As part of 24hr Hackathon project, I lead a team of 8 developers to build an application that reimagined how users preserve their family history and share with their family. The goal was to create a simple online space where the members would be proud to showcase their discovery and make it easy for other family members to collaborate. The result was Family Wall where users can curate from the mementoes (photos, stories, clippings, etc.) they’ve collected or auto generated content based on the key events. We also introduced social features such as ability to comment or simply ‘like’ the content for other family members to join in and participate in preserving a family history.

We created a working prototype using open API data and presented to the product team. It was well received by the team and became key theme for the product roadmap.

Discovery

Recommendations

Activities & Deliverables

Product Planning, Data Integration, Interaction and UI Design, Production, Presentation