Family Tree | Peter Rest

Family Connect

A family tree builder passion project

Problem: In many families (and certainly mine), the life stories of loved ones are often poorly-told (or not told at all) and vulnerable to disappearing forever. Memories and documents are often scattered across mediums—from old physical binders to disparate digital formats—making them hard to access and often losing the essence of family members’ personalities. This disconnection not only makes the past feel distant and impersonal but also poses a significant challenge for younger generations who are tasked with preserving and passing on these invaluable narratives.

Solution: Create a web-based family tree app that centralizes and enlivens family stories and personalities (not just data) in one accessible place. Design the solution to allow for easy writing, sharing, and collaboration so that family of all ages (including younger generations) are enabled to easily connect with and preserve their heritage.

See the final concept below, or see how we arrived there in the case study below.

How we got here

Background

My family is always telling stories. For as long as I can remember, my Dad has told me stories about his life growing up in Chicago, and my mom about her's growing up in a small town in downstate Illinois. My grandparents and extended family have their own, and as I age I collect more of my own.

Many times and in many different ways, various family members have tried to capture these stories. Sometimes within binders of written stories and scanned documents (see the image to the right), other times in digital platforms like Facebook pages. The intention has always been to preserve information, but the result has often been poorly organized or managed spaces whose information is often hard to engage with or understand without the family member who shared, and/or it's difficult to share to the information with others (e.g. mailing a giant binder, or trying to recruit 18 year olds to make a Facebook account to view a family tree page).

For the longest time, we'd talked about finding a better way to tell these stories, but without action.

This is a binder that my great uncle Merle created over many years capturing his life story, but also a lot stories and documents from my Mom's side. Tons of great information, but very dense

An idea is born

After my uncle Merle passed (who was widely seen as the family historian on my mom's side, and was the author of the book shown in the image above), there was a renewed sense of duty amongst my immediate family to carry the torch and preserve not just the stories he told, but the enthusiasm and intention he told them with.

So, I sat down with my parents and we started brainstorming at what we wanted to preserve, and how we might do that. That sparked the idea for some kind of digital document or platform that focused primarily on capturing stories, not just data and stats. We also wanted something that could be easily shared with family members, while still being private.

Interviewing

With a very high-level idea and no clue where to start, we knew that whatever we created, we wanted it to engage not just my immediate family, but anyone in our extended family who was interested.

So, we called various members of our extended family to give them a high-level overview of the problem we were trying to solve and that we wanted to get input from them on what they wanted to know about their relatives (past and present) and why they wanted to know it.

Finding trends

Beyond having great, meaningful conversations and feeling closer to my relatives, there were some observable trends in the answers.

Assuming the Problems

Based on this, we assumed a few problems:
- It was hard feel a sense of empathy or relation to dates and numbers, making distant relatives hard to feel a sense of obligation to preserve
- People did not know how they fit into a larger story themselves
- People did not feel comfortable or that they had enough time to write about relatives lives based on the information they had, and it felt hard and ambiguous to try and fill their knowledge gaps

Feature Brainstorming

So, we tried to brainstorm a few features and pieces of functionality to "kickstart" the actual work

Prototyping

Based on this, we started prototyping ideas.

*Explanations through this section accompanied by screenshots

Usability Testing

We sat down and tried to get feedback on some of the key features.

Outcome

We hit a snag. People wanted to have limited sharing for their own relatives and trees. And, they did not really understand in the design if our how they could add those to their trees/relatives.

Ideation on sharing

So we went back to the drawing board a bit here. We talked with some of the individuals who gave this feedback to learn more about some of the privacy and restrictions they wanted on their trees/relatives.

In short they wanted the ability to share and see others', but maintain their own private records if they chose. OR merge the records.

Testing new ideas

So, we went back to the drawing board for some new ideas. We put together some ideas for new sharing functionality and workflows.

Success!

The new sharing and permission workflows were easy to use and well received. People enjoyed the privacy, but option to collaborate.

Learnings & Next Steps

While the functionality for sharing, posts, and collaborating was conceptual and would require a developed product, the system of organizing and displaying content was defined and understood by our family.

So, I input the information for our immediate family into a large-scale Figma Prototype that displays static data, and take requests from my close family as they come in to add information and content.

Maybe someday we will make this a developed product!