Using Notifications To Help Customers Learn More About Their Family
At Ancestry, we are proud to connect users with their families past and present. We help people learn about their ancestors’ lives so that they learn more about their own identity. Ancestry helps families to preserve their legacy and pass down their stories to future generations. Notifications are a key part of this experience, as they provide users with timely and relevant information about their family history research. Notifications can be triggered by a variety of events, such as new hints, messages, or DNA matches. Through notifications, we help users stay engaged in their research and connect with their family history.
To learn more about their families, users build a family tree through which we surface relevant records, historical documents, photos, and stories that contain information about their ancestors. These artifacts are called Hints. Ancestry has a collection of over 11 billion records through which these hints are generated daily.
Users can also connect with their living relatives through DNA Matches. Ancestry processes millions of new customer DNA every year. We connect close and distant family members who share DNA with each other.
Ancestry’s product offers tools for customers to:
- Build their family tree as far back as possible
- Paint a picture of their Ancestor’s life as accurately as possible
- Communicate and collaborate with family members, and other Ancestry users to discover more about their families
Why Notifications?
Notifications are messages or prompts that provide time-sensitive information, and recommendations to users.
In Ancestry’s context notifications play a key role in helping customers:
- By providing meaningful and personalized next steps and recommendations that will help them learn more about their family
- By keeping them informed about communication and collaboration with other ancestry members
- By surfacing new and updated product features that can help them in their pursuit to learn more about their ancestors
How do we trigger notifications?
Primarily notifications are of three kinds:
- As a response to the user’s activity on the platform
- From the activity of other users on the platform
- Ancestry triggers without user activity to pass on meaningful information
Case 1: Hints for the Ancestor that the user was most recently working on
Users express a desire to paint a complete picture of their ancestor’s life. The primary building block to accurately understanding finer details about the ancestor’s life is to identify details around birth, marriage, and death. Once these key details are added to the tree users can more accurately picture historical details about the time and place that the ancestors lived in.
When a user adds a node to the tree, we are able to suggest all sorts of historical records, pictures, and artifacts in the form of hints. However, sometimes when users start working on their tree they are confused about which hint to evaluate next.
In order to solve this problem, we created a notification that triggers if the ancestor that the user was working on has a hint that contains birth, marriage, or death information. This notification triggers after a period of user inactivity which helps customers by reminding them of the ancestor that they were working on so that they can easily pick up where they left off.
Case 2: Message reminders
Ancestry members benefit heavily from the huge community of other Ancestry users who might share DNA with them or have some sort of overlap between family trees.
One of the primary tools that enable this is the messaging feature on Ancestry through which ancestry members can connect with each other. However, one of the major user pain points was that sometimes they don’t hear back after messaging another ancestry user.
We developed a message reminder notification that triggers if a user has not read a message that they received from another user for seven days. This notification helps users easily connect with other users and inspires better collaboration on the platform. After the launch of this notification, we noticed a 30% increase in the number of users who send at least one message.
Case 3: DNA Matches
Ancestry processes millions of DNA samples every year. This results in new Ancestry users who potentially share DNA with existing Ancestry users. They can be close relatives, such as parents, siblings, or children, or they can other relatives, such as cousins or even more distant ancestors. If a user shares a significant amount of DNA with someone else, they’ll be considered a DNA match. Customers want to actively learn more about new DNA matches as they can be a valuable tool for family history research and meeting relatives that were unknown to them.
We came up with a DNA matches notification that triggers every time a new DNA match who shares significant DNA joins Ancestry. This notification helps customers connect with new matches through messages and explore their family history together. This notification is one of the significant drivers of DNA matches engagement with a CTR of 40%.
Conclusion
Notifications are a powerful tool that can be used to improve the user experience. We were able to improve the Ancestry experience by closely examining user pain points and using notifications as a touchpoint to convey timely and relevant information to our users. Notifications are now an integral part of Ancestry experience with more than 70% of monthly active users engaging with at least one notification. We are continuing to explore machine-learning and personalization tools that will help us meet our users where they are in their journey of discovering more about their families.
As we continue to build more meaningful Ancestry experiences where families can come together to craft and connect around their family legacy, notifications will play an important and responsible role in enabling these user experiences.
If you’re interested in joining Ancestry, we’re hiring! Feel free to check out our careers page for more info. Also, please see our medium page to see what Ancestry is up to and read more articles like this.
