How a family tree tool I designed simplified the storytelling of complex family histories
My role: Product Designer
Timeline: 3 months
Methods used:
Writing is hard. Especially about the people you love. So often times, we don't write anything about them at all, and their life stories are lost to time.
This project—"Family Connect"—aimed to change that.
Problems:
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Family historical records often focus solely on stats and data. This disconnection not only makes the past feel distant and impersonal
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Records that do exist are often scattered across mediums
Solution:
Create a web-based family tree app that organizes and enlivens family stories and personalities—not just data—in one accessible place. Design the solution to allow for easy writing, sharing, and collaboration.
See the final concept below, or see how we arrived there in the case study below.
New relative workflow (~3 mins)
Relative page overview (~2 mins)
Background
My family is always recording history. For as long as I can remember, my Dad has told me about his side of the family and his childhood growing up in Chicago, and my mom about her's and growing up in a small town in downstate Illinois.
Many times and in many different ways, various family members have tried to capture their own family history. Sometimes within binders of written stories and scanned documents (see an example below), and other times in digital platforms like family tree building apps, or even Facebook pages. The intention has always been to preserve information, but the results have been spaces whose information is often hard to engage with and maintain/mature over time without the family member who documented the information (or another family member with the appropriate knowledge).
For a long time, we'd talked about finding a better way to preserve family history, 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 and by far the most organized family artifact we have, 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 images above), there was a renewed sense of duty amongst my immediate family to carry the torch and preserve not just the history he knew, but also the enthusiasm and intention he told it 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 to centralize our family records and tree.
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 prepared some questions and reached out to a handful of family members to give them a high-level overview of the problem we were trying to solve.
We asked if they would be interested in having some conversations guided by a few prepared questions (11 in total) over a video call in the coming weeks. We had a lot of interest from the family, and decided to sit down with 6 different people that collectively represented what we felt to be a diverse set of perspectives and backgrounds.
A handful of screenshots of the summarized responses recorded in FigJam from each interviewee. Each color represents a different interview, and each sticky note represents a unique answer/response.
Finding trends & assuming problems
Beyond having great, meaningful conversations and feeling closer to my relatives, I was able to gather some insights.
Based on this, I assumed a few problems:
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No one currently uses one, exclusive digital platform to store their information. Reasons include the tools are hard to use, are too expensive, and/or have poor sharing features.
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Related to this, some family members often used tools like Ancestry.com to find information, but then used other means to try and organize the data because they found the sites difficult for viewing information.
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People want to read a relative's life story (not just stats and data) but have a hard time writing stories and weaving everything into a biography. The task of writing someone's life story often seems daunting, and they aren't sure where to start writing—which prevents many people from writing anything at all.
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There is an inverse relationship between age and technology use, as well as age and family tree knowledge.
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Most existing tools are expensive, especially those that offer advanced privacy features.
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It's hard to find information about distant or much older relatives. It's often harder to verify information if it can be sourced.
I also observed a couple of other trends:
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Privacy is very important to people. People want to record sentimental and sensitive things about ancestors and relatives (like anecdotes, photos, and even medical histories), but do not want to share with people they don’t trust, which scares people off of using some platforms.
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Almost everyone uses Windows applications. Facebook is also common.
A handful of screenshots previewing the insights gathered and which interview questions/responses they were generated from.
Looking at other tools
Afterwards, we wanted to take a look at what other ancestry or family tree tools offered, and how we could compare that against some of the interview responses. We created trial accounts and very simple family trees on the following tools:
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Ancestry.com
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FamilySearch.org
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Findmypast.org
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MyHeritage
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Geneanet
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Filae
In short, I felt that all of the tools had one or more of the following problems (which were each consistent with the responses and insights above):
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Generally felt difficult to navigate and orient yourself in the system. Most interfaces across each tool had little to no hierarchy or emphasis of information within any given screen. It felt like a constant maze of competing information everywhere, all the time.
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Limited sharing abilities. Most tools required the user to have a paid account even just to view records and documents. I felt this added unnecessary friction.
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The tools had a huge emphasis on sourcing data, but not as much on the actual presentation of it or how it could be woven into a story. Even tools that claimed to capture stories (like Ancestry.com with the "LifeStory" feature) merely presented data in chronological order rather than emphasizing spaces to freely write or record a biography.
Some examples of Ancestry.com's features, workflows, and interface, along with handful of annotations and reviews of some workflows.
Deciding on problems to solve
Based on what we had learned and researched, there were a variety of problems I felt we could solve (as noted in the above two sections).
So, I prioritized the two main problems I felt were the most important to solve:
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Family trees records are often scattered across mediums as some tools are used to source and/or validate information, and others are attempts at organizing and sharing them
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Family tree records often solely (or primarily) focus on data rather than capturing stories and the personalities of relatives
Based on that, I established what we were going to design, or our "solution" statement:
Create a web-based family tree app that organizes 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.
I also felt it was important to establish what we weren't going to design, at least for the first phase of the project:
For now, do not design features for researching, sourcing, or validating data.
Focus primarily on creating an organization tool whose main function is to piece together information collected elsewhere.
Feature brainstorming
Afterwards, we felt we were ready to start brainstorming what actual features and content we wanted to include in the solution.
We started by brainstorming the content we wanted to include, and the actions we wanted to make available to users.
Information architecture ideation
After aligning on the initial content and actions we wanted to include in the solution, I mapped out how we might organize this content in the system, and where the actions might be performed.
Wireframing
From here, I started sketching out the flows and interfaces.
I kept this very high-level, focusing on how best to visualize and prioritize the content while keeping workflows straightforward and relevant to the contexts in which they lived.
Prototyping
As I concluded wireframing and refined workflows piece by piece throughout the application, I began to build and refine a design system alongside the workflows I felt were ready to add more specificity and visual maturity to.
As I progressed, I was able to "snowball" progress in both creating high-fidelity, consistent UI across the application, as well as prototyping the intended functionality.
Since most of our interviewees were familiar with Windows applications and Facebook,
I intentionally pulled inspiration from a handful of UI patterns from Windows
(specifically their Design System "Fluent") and workflows from Facebook.
Usability testing & feedback
I set up video calls with 5 of the original 6 family members and gave them a handful of pre-defined tasks (5 in total) to complete to the best of their ability without any guidance.
At the end of each task, I asked:
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How they felt that task went
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How easy they felt it was to complete on a scale of 1-10 (10 being easiest)
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What they thought about the feature included in the task
The results were encouraging—100% task completion and an NPS of 89 across all tasks.
However, based on discussions and some of the feedback, I came away with two areas I wanted to explore further:
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Workflows for shared, duplicate relatives. In scenarios where a user has already created a relative on their tree, it's possible that another user might share the same relative with them that they have created themselves. When this occurs, the recipient may want to consider several options, such as merging the newly shared relative's record with the one they have already created.
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Scenarios for when there is very little information about a relative. For example, someone who was born hundreds of years ago where there might be little to no known data about the person, let alone stories about their lives.
Exploring & refining
After exploring and refining, I added two concepts within the prototype:
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Duplicate relative workflows: Workflow options were added for a user to replace or combine their relative with the shared relative.
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Scenarios for when there is very little information about a relative: An example was added for when little to no information was known for a relative. Additionally, an "unknown" checkbox option was also added alongside date pickers for various required fields in the new relative workflow.
The duplicate relative workflows were tested via two additional follow-up tasks in separate video call that acted as an "extension" of the usability test conducted in the first call.
The results for the additional tasks were also very positive.
100% task completion and a 76 NPS.