Connecting Africans to their Ancestors
Africans who are motivated to do family history have difficulty utilizing the current FamilySearch experience or are unable to access it from their phone due to no internet or lack of data.
Background
Is this your ancestor? - bridging the gap:
FamilySearch has collected oral genealogies from thousands of families in Africa in hopes of connecting Africans to their relatives. I joined the team a couple months after some testing was performed in Africa. The experience to be improved was connecting a user to an ancestor found in an oral genealogy.
April - July 2023
Role:
UX Design Intern
Tools:
Figma
Protopie
Deliverables:
Mockups
Prototypes
Documentation
Problem
Too Complicated For Users:
From the in-country testing performed in November 2022, the designer and project manager found that some visuals were confusing for the users, even those who have used FamilySearch before. A small pivot was made but a larger pivot was needed.
"Simplicity is crucial for our audience if we ever hope for them to use this tool." -Jonathan Gustavson, Experience Manager
Solution
Helping users build their tree back to their ancestor:
Users in Africa are able to connect to their ancestor from an oral genealogy by building their family tree back through a simple flow.
Pivot 1 - A Question Approach:
The need to create a person from a record also exists in other countries, so we began collaborating with designers and PM's on other teams at FamilySearch. Through this collaboration, the idea of a question based approach was created and we decided to run with it.
Initially, we kept the pedigree visual in tandem with the questions. I found from unmoderated testing that users found the questions to be simple but were unsure of the pedigree. We decided to drop the visual all together from the feedback we had received in testing.
Pivot 2 - Away from Questions:
After more rounds of user testing, I observed users getting hung up on screen where we asked between two people: Grandfather's Father and Grandmother's Father. We had a couple users sit on this screen for over 20 seconds.
We did brainstorming with other teams of how to help the users' achieve their goal of building back to their relative. We pivoted from asking questions to having the user fill out their family's information as they connect back to their relative.
Right Direction - Some Minor Changes:
This last pivot greatly improved the experience. From the user tests performed, users were able to easily build back to a relative. Many found the experience to be intuitive and the flow easy. We found a 100% completion rate from these tests.
A constraint that was brought up by the engineers was having the gender at a minimum to build back correctly. To work with this constraint, the users have to select a gender before they can skip the person.
We found some people didn't know they were creating a family tree. Another team was using a different call to action on their screens so we decided to try it to see if it would help the users' understanding of what they were creating.
In the user tests I performed, I asked users their understanding of what they just did and all users said they had built a family tree back to their relative (exactly what we were looking for!).
"I would pay [for this]! With what I saw and the benefit I would get from it." - User from Morocco
Outcomes:
100% completion rate from the latest round of testing
User satisfaction: 4/5 - some users want the ability to add extended family such as cousins
Final Thoughts:
What I learned:
Frequently meeting with engineers is key to ensuring feasibility of designs for patrons in Africa
Collaboration with other designers and product managers allow ideas to flow freely
Work within developer constraints and business needs
Next Steps:
Conduct testing in Africa on next company trip
Research the need for users to add their cousins and great aunt/uncle
