Great ideas on how to improve the UX of Ancestry.com’s genealogy tool
I’ve been using Ancestry.com for several years. Before that, I used the FamilyTree DNA application (you know, the one you actually install on your computer? That’s how long I’ve been doing genealogy!)
Since UX is my specialty, I have some ways that genealogical research tools could greatly improve the customer journey. I also was greatly inspired by genetic genealogist CeCe Moore’s research in building family trees from partial DNA matches.
First, we need a way to add a source to a person, but indicate our belief in the validity of that source. My thoughts are Very sure, Somewhat sure, Not sure. They do have Maybe, but that doesn’t show it on their record, which isn’t helpful, and doesn’t allow anyone else to benefit from my research. Their “Save it to my shoebox” is really not helpful. Where on earth does that go? Why can’t I save it to the shoebox of a particular person or a particular family, at least? Going back to my scale, then, if I am looking at another family tree that shares ancestors with mine, I could see 1) how painstaking that person was with their research — if they didn’t bother marking the validity, I’d know that their tree was probably a less accurate one and 2) would be able to choose the more valid tree from amongst several.
Second, why do they hide how to put a whole family’s DNA on one account? We had to research how to share my husband’s DNA with my account, since we obviously were researching the same tree (including our children’s ancestry, which shares ancestors with my husband), but didn’t want to have to pay $80/month for yet another account.
Third, there are a lot of people who are trying to track down their roots. They could have been adopted or just not know their birth father, for example. However, they come up as a DNA match to me. So, that’s a mystery I want to solve. In order to help one “cousin” (not sure if she’s 2nd or 3rd or removed) who was linked through my paternal side (she was linked to a verified half-cousin as well, whom I actually knew outside of Ancestry.com), I took her birth location (near Chicago), then looked at any of my paternal grandfather’s siblings who were located in the Chicago suburbs. As I was doing so, I was struck by an easy way to solve this. Why couldn’t you say, “Give me the residence and death locations of this group of siblings (or some other group you’re trying to track) and only return those that are within the vicinity of greater Chicagoland.” In this case, I know that my father, who was born out of wedlock to my paternal grandfather, was born in Waukegan, where his mom was sent to live while pregnant — staying with one of his siblings. I also know from talking to this cousin that she was born in Waukegan. Eureka! She could be descended from a previous generation’s siblings, but the first one I’d go with would be the only sibling located in that Chicagoland area at any time in his life, Victor. Looking at the cMs matched as well as the length of longest DNA strand shared is next up on my agenda to improving my genetic research understanding and leveling up.
Show my direct line — all you need to do is put a colored border, such as green or blue (for color-blind accessibility) around the person that is linked to me in the tree. Or let me set that myself. People have been trying to use text to do that for decades — Lars Sorensen, 5TH GGF, for example.
To make people stickier, you need to really get them excited about genealogy. That means you have to make it easier for them to search Ancestry, but also let them know about all the other repositories out there: Familysearch.org, FamilyTreeDNA, MyHeritage, GEDMATCH.com — yes, some of these are somewhat competitors, but the more connections people can make both to living relatives, as well as tracing back the generations, the stickier you’ve made it because they’ve invested more time in it.
Give me one checkmark to rule them all. If I’ve decided that I want to take every person related to an ancestor, don’t make me check every single one. Let me know if there are perceived duplicates in the view where I can select family trees itself, then let me be the judge. Already, it’s not clear if I don’t select a child that the other tree has, but that I also have, will it still associate the source with that child? Why give us poor descendants of Irish and Danish large families so many unnecessary clicks? Talk about carpal tunnel!
To that end, allow us to enter children in bulk, at least the full name, birth and death date and locations. This allows us to focus on our direct line, but also enables us to continue building connections to relatives, thereby enhancing the stickiness! A win-win!
Make it easier to copy a deceased person from ThruLines over. If I can see the DNA match person, I should have one checkbox that enables me to copy all of these relatives over. There’s also no reason to not allow me to copy a Private person over — sure, I won’t have their details, but I will have that they exist, which will make it easier to connect to a DNA match that I can see who, for example, has a living parent that I can’t. To workaround this, I have to create placeholders for this person with the last name of the parent’s parent, then add my actual DNA match.
Allow people to opt in to be notified of other DNA matches finding connections to them and establishing relationships (Oh, that’s my 3rd cousin!) with them. This will increase stickiness, as people will be able to benefit from crowdsourcing. Along that line, allow people to opt in to be contacted by a DNA match. Many people aren’t interested and are just there because a relative put them up (my husband and kids, for example), so they just never respond and aren’t active on the app, which is wasted time spent contacting these people for serious genealogists.
It’s easy to lose track of where we are when dealing with large families. A breadcrumb trail of the ancestry would be great, for example, I’m working on Soren Thomsen, now Thomas Vognsen (his father), now Karen Sorensdatter (his mother).
Thrulines goes up to your 5th great-grandparents. So if you know that you have links to all of them, give us an easy way to apply tags in bulk. Or at least set a set of tags, such as Common DNA Ancestor, Direct Ancestor, Verified, so that we can apply that same set to each person. But the more you can enable us to perform actions in bulk, the stickier we’ll be. Think automation!
In the vein of automation, if we’re adding multiple children, you’re populating the last name of the parent automatically, which is great. But not if you’re tracing Danish ancestors, where the name of the father is prepended to sen or sdatter. If we’re changing this on a few of the children, why not default to what we’ve been typing or allow us to type a few letters into the last name, then prompt us? Or provide a checkbox, “Use this last name for all children in this family”.
I tried to create a source from familysearch.org, but that source was not available for any other records. Enabling us to select the website and provide the particular record URL would speed up fast tree building, as well as make sure we’re adding a source to facts. While we’re at it, if we’re getting facts all from one source, it would be nice not to have to add that source for every fact. Enable us to bulk assign a particular source to multiple facts on one person as well as to multiple people within a family. Think census records — it shows a whole household, but you can only easily associate that source with the person for whom the source is most closely linked. Why not enable us to add it for the parents and their children and even any relatives who were boarding with them (as happened often in Danish and Irish immigrant families when they were in the US).
Merging duplicates is a big part of joining duplicate people or of moving someone to their correct family. When merging, we shouldn’t be faced with duplicate children of the duplicate people. In the merge comparison, let us choose which children to include in the merged single person. Also, allow us to remove children directly from the Family view, or at least when we click Edit. Making us go into the child’s record loses our context that we are working on the parent’s record. Also, give us the option to remove a child completely from the tree when we do this. In cleaning up a merge, this would make it much simpler, reduce a huge number of clicks and context switches.
Instead of making us count the number of children or siblings to make sure that we’ve got our records straight, just do the math for us.
There’s no indicator of which people are dead vs which ones are alive on the tree itself. At first, I thought that the little green leaf indicator meant alive, but no, that means hints. I believe MyHeritage.com is the one that puts little black bands (think funeral) on the people’s “cards”.
A few times in my tree I see babies born the same year to the same parents or sadly, see them die that same year. Give us a way to indicate probable twins. It would be cool to see the propensity for twins in our heritage.
If people’s deaths are unknown, but they lived during something that killed mostly everyone (at least half of the world’s population at that time) such as the black plague, bring that information forward to us. Let us know that they could potentially have been a victim of that pandemic.
Years ago, when I started using Ancestry.com, I met with one of the UX team there, who I believe was a former colleague of mine at graduate school at Bentley University, if I remember correctly. I shared some of my ideas about the much newer site then. One of them was to show a map showing how a person and their family had spread out over a country or even the world. I’m happy to say that something like that did get implemented. However, if we add facts to a person, we have to explicitly check the “Show on LifeStory map” checkbox. It would be good if this was checked by default and we opted not to check it (or if on LifeStory tab, you could hover over a fact to add it to the map, rather than having to go into each tab and then try to remember if you’ve added it or not. The more you can do to reduce the cognitive burden on us and not force us to try to keep information in our heads and the fewer repetitive manual tasks we need to perform, the happier (and stickier!) we’ll be.
In tracing up known trees of my Danish ancestors and relatives, it’s easy to forget which person you left off on — provide us with the ability to flag someone from both the tree and the profile view. We could even add a note to the person. While you can add notes to the person’s profile today, they are well hidden — there’s a tiny note indicator that you need to click to show a notes panel, which is not really keeping the information very visible. How about something more salient that reminds me? You could even bring me back if I get busy and don’t visit for awhile, “Hey, you’ve got Michael Andersen flagged. Just wanted to remind you — we know it’s easy to get busy. You’d said you wanted to ‘trace his parentage’ next. There’s no time like the present!” That’s a bit of a double entendre, since we’re obviously using our present to research our past, and the dead aren’t getting any deader, while we all are slipping inexorably towards the end.
I can almost feel how much stickier we’re all getting with all this automation, reduction of repetitive manual tasks, decreased cognitive burden, reminders to come back and explore.
ThruLines is very cool, but it hasn’t been integrated into the rest of the application. Let us see a DNA connection on not only the profile of the person, but also on the particular child (and parents) that we’re descended from.
I’ve been waiting to find time during my busy schedule of running a UX team and content strategy team to actually mock some of these up — I think it would be a lot of fun! But I’m also busy helping three kids with college essays and such, so I’m publishing this as-is and I hope to come back to it, but thought it would be fun to at least get the information out. I saw Ancestry was hiring for a Director of UX recently — Ancestry, if you’re interested, I’d love to talk! :-D
