What Empathy Really Means Part 2

The Case Study

The Introduction

FamilySearch is an international non-profit whose mission is to document the entire human family in one place.

While the North American user base is more established, there hasn’t been a concerted effort to move into international markets until recently. This case study follows the redesign of the Chinese language experience on FamilySearch.org.

(Disclaimer: This case study focuses on the 4 months of my internship. I didn’t see it through before going back to school so it only covers what I was able to work on during that short timeframe.)

Meet The Teams

Home

Product Manager: Ryan Parker

UX Designer: Caden Damiano

UX Designer: Denis Modugno

UX Designer: Ferenc Petho

Discovery

Product Manager: Dan Call

UX Designer: Curtis Barlow

Chinese

Product Manager: Eric Leach

UX Designer: Christine Chiang

The Problem

FamilySearch has an offering of powerful tools that allow any visitor to access millions of records and build their family tree. Powerful as they are, the current product offerings do not lend well to users in China.

You see, Chinese culture is collectivist in nature, they care about the whole, the clan they belong to, and do not value individualism like most westerners. Our product does that cater well outside of Western cultures.

Which is a shame, because we have the world’s largest collection of Chinese genealogical records.

The Goal

Create a web experience that is relevant to Chinese users and communicates value in a way that makes sense to a first-time patron to the site from the Hong Kong and Taiwan areas. This should result in higher sign-ups and usage in the China area.

My Role

As a designer on the home page team, I was responsible to collaborate with 5 different teams to design a Chinese landing page and discovery experience that would help onboard and retain Chinese patrons.

One of the teams I worked with was the Chinese team. Chinese genealogy is so robust that it needs a dedicated team on staff to tackle those specific problems. So I worked with their designer Christine to get a crash course on Chinese values and preferences.

Christine Chiang from the Chinese team collaborating on the designs.

Wireframes of the Landing Page to Discovery Flow

Dan Call explaining Chinese Genealogy

Current Political Landscape

FamilySearch is a big organization, and I had to talk with 5 different teams to figure out how my designed solution would fit into the FS ecosystem. It was so confusing that I mapped out the agendas and political relationships between the involved product teams.

From this information, I was able to collaborate with Dan Call and Curtis Barlow of the discovery team and also work the Chinese team without assuming the intentions of other teams whos agendas influence our success. You can look at this concept map and see how everything fit together at the start of the project.

Visualizing Office Politics

Research

The core of my research is interviewing the designer Christine on all the nuances of Chinese culture and getting up to speed on her years of user research. I also read up a lot on how Chinese patrons engage with media.

Chinese genealogical records called Jiapu are way more robust than western records. In one book, you can get a detailed generational record going back thousands of years. Unfortunately, many records were destroyed in the Chinese Cultural revolution, so our collection is a huge value proposition to Chinese patrons. They think their identity is destroyed when there is a good chance their history is safe on FamilySearch’s servers.

Guiding Principles

Based on the research, we organized the core principles of a Chinese experience:

• Chinese people think of genealogy as starting with the past and going forward in time to the current generation. Westerners see it as going back in time.
• Chinese value the whole of the individual, instead of the western individualist ideology.
• Chinese messages are not direct, they are a high context culture that requires the building of trust and goodwill before engaging in a relationship. In contrast westerners from low context cultures respond to CTA’s like “buy this”, and “sign up now!” with little to no rapport building.

Strategy

From that understanding of Chinese Geneology, we knew we could take that and the value propositions from the English page like “discover yourself” and “see all our records” wasn’t relevant to a Chinese visitor.

• So the copy and images need to communicate how the site benefits the persons, the whole family/clan.
• That the Jaipu records are plugged specifically instead of all the records FamilySearch has.
• The surname discovery experience is more relevant to the Chinese user because you don’t need a bunch of search fields like westerners. You just need to find one the right Jiapu and you can see everything you need to see.

Flows and Wireframes

As I was adapting a kiosk experience, so I first audited that experiences flow and proposed a new one.

I usually write things down on paper and use a red marker to take notes while showing mocks to other designers.

Audit of the Discovery teams Kiosk experience.

Remixed discovery that is streamlined for on-boarding.

These are some initial mocks to get an idea of how I can go about designing the screens. But it is never that easy…

But after some careful thought and talking about it with other designers, I decided that the kiosk discovery experience, that required multiple screens, was too superfluous for a quick web experience. To keep up momentum going into the sign-up and onboarding flow, I wanted to consolidate the information about the queried surnames to be on one landing page instead of 4.

This led to the following flow:

By creating a flow, I was able to learn about the scenarios I haven’t even thought of. What happens if they can’t find their surname? What happens if they don’t sign up? Where do they go after registration? Why do we need an app landing page? Why don’t they just end up in the app store?

Landing Page High Fidelity Comps

I had to work with the Chinese team to get the written copy solid, but because they had limited bandwidth and I had little time, we planned the value propositions by section in the landing page and I went ahead to design the home screens first and placed filler copy.

Using photoshop I cropped out the subjects of the photos and applied a gradients to make them ”pop”. The illustration was intended to mimic a generational view of the Tree product that the Chinese team was designing.

What I Have Learned So Far

My internship ended before I could go ahead with future designs. But the experience of not being around enough to see a whole project through taught me a powerful lesson:

“Create everything like you are going to get hit by a truck tomorrow”

I wanted to make sure the project went through the whole lifecycle long after I was gone, so I made sure to clean up the layers in sketch and files in the project folder so that my coworker Ferenc could pick it up later. I also met with him to go over my process so he wouldn’t be starting from scratch.

The biggest take away from this project is that you have to be aware of culture when designing for international products. You have to assume you know nothing while going into the project and listen and learn as much a possible to provide the best experience for every visitor of the site. Cultural empathy is good business.

Caden Damiano is a User Experience Designer based in the Silicon Slopes.