FamilySearch: Occupations Campaign
“The difference… PRESENTATION!” (Megamind)
The Goal
FamilySearch is continually acquiring new records. We want patrons to be aware of when those collections become available. We designed and built a personalized campaign, that is released via email and promoted on the site. Two censuses had recently been indexed that contained occupations, a new field that had previously never been indexed. We wanted to share this new information with their descendants so they could come to know them better.
Project Duration: End of June — beginning of September 2017
Released over Labor Day weekend.
The Team
I was asked to spearhead this campaign, it would be my first solo campaign as an intern. It very well could have been a catastrophe without my design cohorts Ryon and Cody, a great development team, and a top-notch QA specialist who made this possible.
Give credit where credit is due: to the team.
Target Audience
This campaign would go out to any living relatives with a FamilySearch account (within 12 generations) of any one person in the U.S. census record. For obvious reasons that made our target audience located in the United States, English speaking, with age ranging anywhere from 13–65.
Problems to be Solved
- How do we surface these new records in an interesting way?
- How do we make an intriguing list?
- The majority of occupations were Farmer or Homemaker in the 1880’s, how do we highlight the more unique types of jobs?
- Can we use this as an opportunity to teach the value of censuses and how to use them?
- What about the edge cases; they only have one ancestor, etc..?
The Original
The initial design requirements included additional context around the life of your ancestors. What would a typical day during look like for them? How does your life compare to theirs? We were working closely with our marketing team to provide some of this content.
My original idea was to display this information in a newspaper-like way. Additional information included:
A quiz to see what occupation you would have had in the 1880s.
An interactive photo of what that occupation looked like in the 1880s and today’s equivalent of said occupation.
A timeline of events that happened during your ancestor’s life.
A comparison of monetary value between now and then.
Constraints
I quickly learned that time was of the essence. What I had imagined the product to be, was well out of scope and impossible to replicate in other countries in so short a time. Thanks to the designers mentioned above we were able to ideate and simplify to something much more attainable.
Solving Problems
How do we make an intriguing list? It seemed to me at the time that there were only so many ways to create a list and none of them were very intriguing. After brainstorming a Netflix-like approach to lists (that again we believed to be out of scope) we came up with a more interactive alternative to the list; turning list items into buttons that would move the ancestor with that occupation into the left card in the banner.
We surfaced the most unique jobs at the top, thanks to our great data team, to improve interest and interactivity. We also combined the occupations of multiple ancestors into one button, to avoid having a large number of duplicate occupations.
A Learning
Given the context above there were some different options for the interaction of the cards. It made sense to have the card selected to be on the left initially when you enter this experience. It also made sense as you scroll through the images with the arrows on either side. However, when in a situation where the user is bouncing around and selecting buttons out of order, (which was commonplace during testing) users expected the one they selected to be the center card. In order to do that, the desktop design would start with only 2 cards center and right while the left-most button was selected.
In the end, I settled for consistency with the buttons and when using the arrows (which was the most common action on mobile) by putting the selected card on the left. I felt like my reasons for this were valid at the time, but looking back I wonder if I didn’t give enough credit to the feedback I received and if there wasn’t another solution that would have satisfied both experiences.
I Fought the Fight
One particular piece that I fought for, ok it wasn’t really a fight, but I am glad I stuck to my guns and kept the age of your ancestor next to their occupation. It gives a very different experience knowing that they were working as a harness maker in their late 40’s or, of course she worked at home she was only 12.
Final Design
After many iterations and working closely with developers and QA, we came around to our final responsive design. It showcased your ancestors and gave context about the person and their occupation. You are able to see up to 20 ancestors' occupations. You can click on each person to see more information about them. The census’s which contained their occupation information was also readily accessible, as well as your relationship to each person. We also worked closely with our marketing team who help curate content to teach people what useful information a census may hold and how to best use that information.
The campaign was released via email over Labor Day weekend of 2017. It was then accessible for several months through the FamilySearch home page. It is still currently sustained on a discovery page.
Conclusion
This project allowed me to really work through the entire experience from ideation to production and retrospective. I was able to work on multiple use cases and create not only the “happy path” but the error pages and edge cases. One of my favorite pages was the sign-in page, where we cycle through occupations your ancestors might have had. We beg the question, who might they have been? What might they have done? I enjoyed working closely with development as we strived to get the timing and animation right for this screen.
