1950 Census District Finder: Solving User Problems Using New Solutions
All product launches have their own challenges, but what if you launch and user won’t have access to their normal flows for a few weeks? You improvise.
Every decade, the U.S National Archives releases a set of census records which in the family history world is similar to your favorite recording artist dropping new music. And when the 1950 census was made available on April 1, 2022, Ancestry was ready. We had the images downloaded and ready to be viewed by our users within 48 hours. But getting them indexed so they were available to users in the normal discovery flows of hints and indexes was going to take more time — weeks at the very least. And we knew our users wanted to find their ancestors as soon as possible.
Our users could page through a state’s worth of images looking for their ancestors but we knew there had to be a way we could make it easier. Removing your users favorite ways to use your site can drive innovation in a hurry.
The problem to solve: how to minimize the number of images a user might have to look through to find their ancestors. Hundreds of images was too overwhelming — but somewhere between 10 and 50 seemed doable.
Location is the key to finding any record for a family historian. And the 1950 census is no different. The government had maps to show enumerators in the 1950s what streets they needed to survey and fortunately for us copies of the maps not only existed but were very clear.
What if we could overlay those maps onto street addresses and then have our users give us a street address or town where they think their ancestors lived in 1950? We could use that information to get them the most likely set of images that held what they were looking for.
We had all of our 1950 census enumeration maps geocoded to modern day coordinates and we put them on top of a Mapbox system. A user could type in an address or city name, say 108 Houston Street, Harris TX and we could show them on a map where to find that street.
From there a user can play with the maps comparing modern day to 1950 and then click through to a much more targeted set of census images, making it easier to find the ancestors they are looking for.
We started seeing references to our new Census Finder on multiple social media channels. I helped spread the news to our users by chatting with Crista Cowan, Ancestry’s very own Barefoot Genealogist. We saw demos by popular genealogy YouTube hosts including Amy Johnson Crow and Nikka Sewell Smith. Well known genealogy bloggers picked it up as well.
Looking for new solutions to user problems? Remove the tried and true solutions and see what pops up.
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