Family history made simple and affordable.
Role: Head up Product Design
In 2009, we launched the first incarnation of Archives, a search engine for historical records and documents. I worked as the sole designer, directly with the founders of Inflection, to create a site that offered users a simple and affordable family history research tool.
Results page from an Archives conversion funnel.
After launch, we optimized the site regularly. Over the coming years at Inflection, we created a unique split testing culture that helped guide the direction of the product. Sometimes we had more than 100 tests running across all of our properties. This testing culture allowed us to rapidly grow in both user base and product quality. My role in this was to help define the split testing process and workflow, design, code and run the tests either myself or by utilizing our rapidly growing team.
As our user base grew, of course, so did our product and team. We launched as a simple and effective search engine for family history. Over the years, we developed into a full suite of family history tools that would disrupt the space and rival the more established brands—in fact, we became #2 in the space in less than 3 years. We regularly rolled out new features, including family tree software, saving and organizing records, an alert system that notifies users when we've added new records that match their criteria. I oversaw UX and implementation while continuing to directly contribute designs for new features.
Our family tree feature
Facilitating a design sprint, day 3.
Output from some of our sketch sessions over the years.
A repertoire of various workshop formats help the team innovate.
In August of 2012, Archives was acquired for $100 million by Ancestry.com. A huge milestone for the team, but our work wasn't nearly finished. We had a lot more to do, and were going to be able to approach it aligned with the #1 player in family history.
Our first year at Ancestry, we had 2 driving goals. Transition both physically and technologically into a new space, and continue to grow and evolve both the product and our team. We painlessly achieved both, and have since entered a new phase of growth.
In early 2015, we launched a new responsive site in four countries, with a more focused version of the site. I led a team of designers and front end developers in the redesign of the site, which focused on feeling good to use and simplifying the experience. The process included working very closely cross-functionally and evangelizing UX priorities across the company to gain buy-in on this massive effort. We used user insights, business strategy, and industry best practice to redefine what Archives does and how we do it.
We answer our users' needs with research. We've done in-home observations, surveys on the website, and persona development. All super-valuable tools to help us understand what we need to deliver.
We reguarly create prototypes and test them both internally and externally to learn what usability issues we have and to gain insight into how to solve them.
Our new site is responsive from first touchpoint through to our revamped image viewer—which is the holy grail of online record search, an actual image of the record youre looking for. The entirety of the site's features are completely accessible from anywhere, at any time.
We launched our new site in 4 countries and have built it to be easily configurable so that we can expand to new markets as they open up. The idiosynchrasies of internationlization present very interesting design challenges and has been a great learning experience.
We continuously explore reducing friction in our marketing funnels and throughout Archives.com's experience to study the effect on conversion, engagement, and retention for our users.
We've always known success needs to be measured both qualitatively and quantitatively, so we built in systems to monitor both. Easily viewing users' behavior on the site, running user interviews, and simple, accessible metrics are core to keeping our product successful and meaningful.