Creating a Personalized Experience for Children
Participated in a contextual inquiry to build a platform for children designed to personalize their family history experience and teach them skills they’d need for an advanced experience.
Introduction & goal
FamilySearch is a non-profit organization built to help people discover their ancestors and preserve family stories. The current FamilySearch site isn’t built for a specific target audience. Instead, it’s been designed to accommodate everyone from different ethnicities, languages, and backgrounds, from the newest beginners to the expert genealogists. However, trying to support a wide range of tools for the experts while not confusing the beginner has become difficult.
Children, in particular, find the current FamilySearch experience hard to navigate and understand.
We put together a team of designers to use information gathered from a contextual inquiry to create a redesign of the current FamilySearch experience. We hoped to introduce children to family history in a much easier and exciting way. With this new experience, we wanted to create an onboarding experience that both engaged the children while creating a space for them to learn basic family history skills.
Bite-sized summary
- Recognized the difficulties children face with the current FamilySearch experience and understood the need for better onboarding
- Researched and studied ways children currently participate in family history and the games they enjoy playing
- Defined requirements for our product to be successful
- Held design sprints to ideate and then create prototypes of the redesign
- Performed user tests with our target audience and made iterations based on feedback we received
My Role
My roles with the team included researching, storyboarding, ideating, prototyping and performing user tests. Our team consisted of 2 other UX Designers and a product manager.
1. The Challenge
As a FamilySearch employee, I often get asked “how can I get my children involved in family history?” or, “does FamilySearch have activities my children could enjoy?” A teenager best described our issue while exploring the current FamilySearch site when she asked,
“What’s the average age of people that use this site, like 60?”
At that moment it dawned on me that children are very aware FamilySearch hasn’t been designed for them. They recognized in a matter of seconds that the current product wasn’t designed for them.
As these children attempted to use our current site, none of them made it past the homepage, giving up due to its unfamiliarity or complexity of creating a free account. Although the current site works great for over 1.6 million contributors a year, it’s just not built for children.
2. Research & Discovery
Back in November of 2018, a group of FamilySearch employees (Kevin Dewey, Mike Sandberg, and Rufino Diaz) traveled to Central America to conduct a contextual inquiry on how youth accomplish family history.
Through immersion and a series of interviews, this team was able to get a good idea of how children accomplish family history. When they returned home, they carefully documented their interviews and the research they’d gathered.
After joining the redesign team, I studied their findings and conducted my own interviews and surveys to validate their findings. The information I gathered coincided with their findings that children don’t feel they have a place to preserve their family history.
Understanding the needs of our audience was crucial in our decision to keep the redesign simple. We decided we wouldn’t support advanced genealogical tools, but instead focus on onboarding these children to family history basics and beginner tools to teach them and help them grow in a friendly environment. These skills would eventually allow them to move to a more advanced product when they felt ready.
3. Design Goals & Process
Our goal was simple: We wanted to design a more child-friendly space where we could teach children basic skills and tools they could use to do family history. Once they learned these skills at their own pace, they could eventually graduate to more advanced products.
John Henrick Clarke said,
“A good teacher, like a good entertainer, first must hold his audience’s attention, then he can teach his lesson.”
Clarke recognized the importance of primarily engaging the audience before being able to teach them. Creating activities centered around children allowed us to leverage quizzes and games they enjoy to first gain their attention. Once they were entertained, we could expect engagement when teaching them about their living family or ancestors.
The sketches above show ideas about how we could engage children while teaching them about family history. After ideating, we held some crazy 8 sketching sessions to generate ideas.
After refining our sketches, we created a storyboard of our prototype. Converting those ideas to digital, we mocked up a homepage and a few activities children could complete to begin our user testing.
After user testing our prototype with 6 children, we noticed a lot of gaps in our design we hadn’t thought of. Following the advice of the book Sprint — How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just 5 days from Google Ventures, we formed 4 “How Might We” questions to fill these gaps:
- How might we help children add names to their tree using our product?
- How might we help children connect with and learn about their living families in more meaningful ways?
- How might we help children learn about the names they find to take to the temple?
- How might we allow the parents to easily create accounts for their children while providing them with a discovery experience?
4. Design Sprints
Following the schedule laid out in the Sprint book, we completed 4 weeks of design sprints, dedicating a week to each question.
Starting off each sprint by defining the goals, we’d map out the challenges while talking to experts to better understand our audience.
We studied products that had been created for children and we gathered books and coloring pages made to engage children in family history. By building off their findings, and using their successes and failures to our advantage, we would sketch out ideas and vote on the best solutions to form a storyboard. Once we completed the storyboard, we were ready to conduct a round of user testing.
Although we only had sketches to show, user testing the flow allowed us to fill holes we were missing and eliminate ideas that didn’t work as we had though.
After we tested enough children, we started mocking up a prototype, occasionally meeting to make changes or adjustments.
5. User Testing & Feedback
User testing was implemented early in our process to identify the biggest pain points in the current FamilySearch product. As we began designing and iterating, we continued to user test at every milestone. Figma prototypes were shared with the CEO to get early feedback. After countless tests and design changes, we were able to prove the importance of this app.
6. Project Learnings
Defining the Problem
In order to work towards a solution, we needed to clearly define what we were trying to solve. Through our research and interviews, we were able to find the pain points for our audience, we then design for their needs.
Collaboration is Key
We consistently shared our progress and designs with team managers, developers, children, and even their parents to get varying opinions and experiences involved in our product. By exposing our process to such a large audience, we were able to ultimately improve our product.
