Mapping Ancestry

— visualize the hidden treasures of your ancestors in your family tree

— length & type

3 months
Product Design
Interaction Design
Visual Design

— role

Lead Product Designer

— team

1 Product Manager, 4 Mobile Engineers

— context

What is a family tree? Genealogy can open a world of possibilities to understanding who we are, where we come from, and who came before us.

— problem to solve

Ancestry customers interact with the product in a behavior triggered by a curiosity spark. (see image) This spark drives the first interaction and creates the continuity for the next. However, when a customer enters the information receipt stage, digesting complex and emotional insights can become challenging to continue this loop of discovery.

A platform such as Ancestry provides millions of family records at our fingertips, but there's only so much than can be deciphered from illegible images from decades before.

— customer insights

"I don't know where to start."

This was a common sentiment across customers who tasked themselves to exploring the history behind their family trees from genealogy novices to enthusiasts.

Once they built the tree, they hit a roadblock to keep growing the tree or discover more about their family. From the tree view, it was not evident to users what other information, such as records, could be available for each person on the tree.

However, for each tree nodule, there was a family member with hidden records waiting to be discovered.

How might we create a dynamic portal to a path of historic personal discovery?

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As a user help me make discoveries, even if I only have a few minutes on my phone.

The Ancestry Map View feature provides genealogy enthusiasts a more dynamic way to visualize their family tree.

— concept

Users can view birth, marriage, and death records of their direct-line ancestors on a map up to the 10th generation.

The feature was released on a roll out basis to 9 million Ancestry Mobile App users through a course of 3 months finalized in the beginning of 2019.

In Detail

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— process

As part of the experience, it was crucial to visualize all data points from records in a clear and engaging fashion.

We explored different levels of visualization from the pin representation of a record, the granularity of geographic details to the color of land and water in the map interface.

— traditional colors

+ Familiarity from other services
- Not cohesive with Ancestry brand

— blue wave color theme

+ Paired to Ethnicity Estimate Map
- What is water? What is land?

— jade green color theme

- Not cohesive with Ancestry brand
- Not accessible

— learnings + outcomes

To understand user behavior and engagement with this new visualization feature, the team focused on the following targeted metrics:

Measure user engagement through number of sessions, average session length focused on the map view and reduction in quick abandowns. The results yielded an increase in in app usage session length to 1:07 minutes in the Map View alone.
Quantifying customer satisfaction through an in app Qualtrics survey, which also allowed the team to calculate the Net Promoter Score (NPS). We saw an increase of 50% in NPS with user feedback trending high such as:

"It's fun. Helps see travel routes and clusters of relatives."

— improvements + iterations

With the intricacies of genealogy, the map view of records unlocked gaps in outdated record database systems through its geo-interactive nature. The current location values for several records were not available in the database for Place Services causing mislabeling of conflicting city or town names.

Through user feedback of incorrectly tagged locations, the database was updated to better prepare the mobile app to deliver more accurate geo-based features. This insight resulted in design iterations to account for conflicting city names across the globe (E.g., Santiago, Dominican Republic and Santiago, Chile).

— Given the nature of this project, further insights and design process can only be revealed in an interview setting.