Redesigning the menu and navigation for Ancestry’s tree building tool
Increasing our customers’ family tree engagement by 170%
ROLE
Principle Product Designer
YEAR
2023
DURATION
3 months
TEAM
Product Manager, User Researcher, Software Engineer, QA, Data Analyst
DELIVERABLES
Heuristic analysis
Competitive analysis
Information architecture analysis
Product principles
Mockups
Prototypes
Executive presentation
Final specs
Asset production
The 3 steps I took to declutter a crowded interface
I knew I needed to declutter our UI but where to begin? Over time, teams had added buttons but no one had ever removed any. The biggest challenge: each team had KPI’s associated with the many buttons in this core part of product so I knew I needed to be thoughtful and persuasive across teams so that I could succeed in shipping these radical changes.
My 3 steps:
Conducting a heuristic analysis
IA analysis and…
Socializing the findings
“To be honest, I have no idea what half these buttons do.
–Customer with 10 years tenure
Example slide from my IA analysis. I was able to identify 9 duplicative buttons, 2 mis-categorized buttons, and a lack of organization between content types and features for novices vs. experts.
A summary of findings from the heuristic analysis
Activities and outputs
IA analysis
Heuristic analysis
Design principles
Iterative usability testing to unlock rapid refinement
If you’re being formal, it’s called RITE usability testing and in more casual terms, it’s called leaving enough time between sessions to update your prototype. A challenge we had: not only did we need to test with novice and expert users, we needed to test with mobile and desktop users. To achieve this we did two round of iterative user testing with two different prototypes.
Week 1: Mobile Prototype
Monday: 2 experts + 2 novices
Tuesday: Iterate prototype
Wednesday: 2 experts + 2 novices
Thursday: Iterate prototype
Friday: 2 experts + 2 novices
Week 2: Desktop Prototype
(repeated the above schedule)
Mobile prototype
Desktop prototype
“This one is way better! You don’t have to go hunting for everything and the tree is cleaner.
I like that.”
–Customer (2 years+)
Activies and outputs
Refined design comps
Mobile & desktop prototypes
Overall, the design was a win. A/B testing resulted in great outcomes for our key engagement metrics!
In addition to the metrics below, we saw other positive lifts: +19% invite button clicked +20% activity button.
101.44%+
nodes created/edited
+119.44%
hint button click rate
+170.59%
# of hints buttons clicked
Feedback about my performance on this project
Deb Lui, CEO, presented my designs as one of 3 projects at our annual Product and Technology conference.
Cara has created a seamless and efficient experience for our users, resulting in outstanding improvements in our key customer engagement metrics.
– Director of Product Design, Ancestry
Working with Cara has been amazing. Immediately after joining the company she hit the ground running. Cara embraces the value of empowering each other with her unique style of working.
– Senior Product Manager, Ancestry
Cara did a FANTASTIC job designing the new Tree Nav navigation, and then was extremely helpful and thorough during build.
– Staff Product Manager, Ancestry
Cara’s collaboration and communication style are fantastic, and she's an absolute joy to work with... but when it comes to making our product better for our customers, Cara has a unique and incredible ability to lead with both her heart and her brain. We're so lucky to have her, and our users are too!
– Principal Content Strategist, Ancestry
Cara is so organized, thoughtful, and sharp. She has come up to speed amazingly fast and is providing value right out of the gate.
– Principal User Researcher, Ancestry
Cara did an amazing and thorough job on the design for a new treeviewer navigation UI. It was easy to follow and really made the development work go smoothly.
– Principal Software Engineer, Ancestry