Ancestry: Stories

Disclaimer: I do not have all of the key details of Ancestry’s user base, and I am making assumptions, based on limited information. This article is simply me diving into one of my favorite companies and exploring a feature that seems intriguing, although it may not be possible due to limitations.

Who is Ancestry?

Ancestry is a software company with the mission to “empower journeys of personal discovery to enrich lives”. They do this by allowing anyone to join their site and discover more about their own family history. They have given the average person an easy and accessible way to learn more about those they are related to.

Who Uses Ancestry?

What is Stories?

A very big trend currently is to ask your grandparents stories about their lives, this way you can hold onto these memories once they pass. These memories can then be shared with future generations, and the story can be heard in the voice of the one who experienced it. The flaws with the way people are currently going about this are as follows:

1. Difficult to store these files for many generations
2. People struggle to ideate what to ask their grandparents

My proposal is “Stories” within Ancestry. A way for everyone to hear their families stories, from those who experienced them.

How Would It Work?

V1 Mock-Up (Listening to Past Stories)

**This is a lofi mock to represent my ideas, not perfect UI**

As seen above, I have mocked up a V1 as what “Stories” may look like. Below you can find a few of my design decisions:

1. From vs. About: I think this would be a unique way to categorize stories both told from the user as well, as about the user. This way if there is any overlap you can hear other individuals talking about your ancestors. It allows another perspective to be painted, you can get to know your ancestors on a more personal level.
2. Top Pick: I believe we could find someone’s top pick story based on what they want to know. Do they want to know about other ancestors? Maybe we can suggest a story about their great grandmother’s mom. This way, our users feel like the experience is personalized to them.
3. Add A Story: This gives users a way to add their own story, either about themselves or about a past relative. This way we can continue to generate stories and there will always be something more to learn about your ancestors.

Going One Step Further

While designing this feature I let my brain run away with a handful of different ideas that I believe would be very beneficial to our users (or the ones I believe ancestry has).

1. Talk To An Ancestor: If we can compile enough data about an ancestor, it would be cool to have a feature where users could talk to this ancestor and ask about their lives or get advice. This feature could leverage an AI model fine tuned on this collected data. While this is technically very difficult it would be a really unique feature to allow users to feel closer to their ancestors.
2. Gameify Stories: Another aspect to “Stories” that would be cool would be to turn it into a game. Users can come on and interview their grandparents to add to their Ancestor profile. When they add a story they are greeted with a randomly selected prompt that they can ask their grandparent about their life.

Considerations

When building out this “Stories” feature there are a few things that crossed my mind as things we may want to think about when implementing:

1. Negative Stories. In my proposal I have added the ability for other individuals to add stories about people. This may turn problematic if the stories added are negative or untrue. I believe we could add some type of approval process to stories being added, if we have the bandwidth.
2. Video and Audio Quality. As with any uploading option, we are faced with the fact that there may be poor video and/or audio quality on the files, making it hard to understand and hear the stories. This could give our users a false sense of hope that they can hear these stories, when in actuality the audio is very poor. I believe we can try and curb this problem by adding in a warning if someone’s video or audio seems poor upon uploading their file, similar to what google meet does if your audio or video are not strong.

Next Steps

Moving forward, I would love to discuss this feature with the rest of the Ancestry team and get any of their thoughts and what they believe needs to be considered (from a user or technically side). Once I have had the chance to sync with my team I would love to be able to bring my mocks to hifi and run user testing and iterate based on those results!