Ancestry.com

Ancestry Insights

Methods to deliver personalized family history discoveries, powered by deep data.︎

Role: Lead Designer

Project Background

Ancestry Insights makes it easier for users to understand what is in their genetic family history. It delivers delightful, bite-sized data points throught the product suite to allow users to make relevant connections and provide spontaneous, useful context as they dig into their past.

Business Goals:

• Increase session time on DNA product
  
• Institute passive, consumption experience to engage and retain non-hobbyist users
• Create a sticky experience to support subscription model
• Create opportunities to upsell into different product lines

Experience Goals

• Deliver delightful, shareable discoveries
  
• Increase user-understanding of genetic principles
  
• Provide useful context at time of need
• Increase user trust
  

A deceptively simple, gnarly piece of work

More technically, Ancestry Insights is a layer integrated into several core Ancestry products, powered by data collected throughout the product platform. It is designed to provide discovery hooks into the deeper layers of the Ancestry.com experience, helping drive user engagement and increase recurring revenue.  

Insight Tiles

Interactive Insights

Role

In this process I was responsible for designing two artifacts: the insight tiles themselves (query outputs), as well as the query inputs for the knowledge graph itself.

I worked with our genetic science and data science team to begin to develop an ontological model of the user, allowing us to use the knowledge graph to find connections and commonalities between them and other users.

We did this by gathering all their user inputs: DNA samples, family trees, ancestors, linked historical records and responses to personalized surveys, and mapping those against their genetic community and their ancestral past, both recent and distant.

Process

I created a series of user surveys and screeners served to a daily percentage of site traffic, as well as through UserTesting.com to gauge broad genetic understanding baselines.

I created a large variety of potential insights based on user research and interviews that we thought would be of interest, then surveyed hundreds of users to see what piqued their interest.

From there I worked with our Data Science team to design queries for the  knowledge graph, and then developed a design system with our front end team that data could flow into and be delivered to the user in an easily parsed manner.

Simplified Query

For instance, a user may have found records in Ancestry’s records that provide info about an ancestor’s marriage — a fairly routine, unremarkable data point with no context.

Our system would injest that fact’s associated data, run it against our KnowledgeGraph and determine if we can generate an insight by compiling an aggregation of facts ajacent to the user’s. Was their ancestor’s marriage unlike other marriages that happened near or in the same date range?

This might result in something tailored to the user, or, it could generate a more general insight for the next larger meaningful group (a regional insight, or genetic community insight).

Feedback

We gauged whether or not a given insight was successful by asking for simple feedback from the user, and monitoring engagment on CTAs. We instrumented help & reference UI and monitored usage. These became inputs into our design sessions.

Data Breadth

Output Design

I designed a series of templates to format insights across four broad-types, in addtion to the iconography and styling, and the interactions around content sourcing and feedback. I also created reports for our product managers to coordinate across science, legal, and product, identifying areas where FDA regulation was likely and risk may be encountered.

Insight Injection points

Pattern Library

Insights Marketing

Working with marketing I designed several approaches to drive awareness and launch experiences around the rollout of Insights. In addition to their injection points in the product at large, we also provided an aggregated landing page to show off the range of possibilities.