UX Strategy — Creating Our New Search Experience
Balancing between great design and business. Stripping the product down to its essential elements.
At some point, people start looking into their past. Those who dive deeper and research their family history are typically called genealogists.
I’m Adi, a Product Designer at MyHeritage, a global company that has built the leading platform for exploring family history. And while I’m not a professional genealogist, I am a diver with more than 150 worldwide dives under my belt.
A dive has 3 phases: plan and prepare, dive and explore, ascend and contemplate. Before a dive I check my equipment, study the route, and pick a buddy. These steps help me focus. During the dive, the image becomes more realistic and sharp. As I ascend, I reflect on what I’ve just seen and the picture of my dive experience brightens. The next time around, I have the opportunity to explore specific spots that caught my eye but were left unchecked. When I design, my overall experience is very similar.
This article will show how a UX process based on data analysis and user research can help the design team make decisions. Additionally, I’ll share some of the lessons I learned along the way.
Navigating through time
MyHeritage’s search engine for historical records is one of the company’s most important products. With hundreds of thousands of daily searches and a growing database of more than 14 billion records, it allows people to research their family history, discover their ancestors’ stories, and enrich their family trees.
“People that forget their past have no future” — Winston Churchill
Search engines’ experience has greatly evolved in other industries over the last few years. Our search engine for historical records was developed in 2012 and was in great need of an upgrade. Such an upgrade would align a decade-old UI platform with a new visual design.
You can imagine how glad I was for the opportunity to dive in and lead this project. I always get excited before a dive; the thrill starts from the second I start planning my route. Planning helps to maximize the experience of each dive and its location, and it keeps me safe.
Motivations and goals
The mission was clear: Deliver information in a simple and accessible way. We needed to create a search experience that will be a starting point for all people. Creating a place for people to be more active and search for new information about their family history. Make the most of their family history research by helping them find meaningful results after conducting a search.
In terms of KPIs, the new search experience needed to show:
- Increase in engagement — performing more actions and spending more time on page.
- Decrease in drop rate — reduce the number of users not performing a search.
- Increase in conversion — observe more users convert from guest to member after performing a search.
In order to reach these goals it is crucial to create an outstanding user experience.
Even after several dives at a location, I can discover something new. For example, while diving in Eilat I stumbled upon an old coin from 1812. Tens of thousands of divers had been there before me. It was an odd but pleasing find :)
Over the years I discovered that design research is an ongoing process. It ends only when one decides their product needs no more improvement and growth; in other words, never. Continuous research gives designers measurable data that helps us focus on goals.
Checking your gear
Trust your equipment, know how and when to use it, and what it can do.
Your gear can be a lifesaver while diving. It can also mean the difference between failure and success when designing a product.
Once I finished the preparation phase, it was time to take a breath and go deeper. In this next sequence, you will see the main changes I made.
A sea of searches
We wanted to serve our two main user personas: seasoned genealogists and more novice users. This meant finding the right balance between a simple search form and an intricate experience. Layout and hierarchy would play a major role in determining how we did this.
Users hesitate to add imprecise information, preferring to be 100% sure before adding new details. Sometimes this can lead to users not performing a search at all.
Data had shown that several fields and options were barely being used in our search form.
Advanced out — Progressive in
During usability testing sessions, we observed that our users were confused about what information to add and how to add it (especially how to use the advanced search option). This meant that even if they had the essential details to search with (date of death, military service, and immigration dates, etc.), they wouldn’t include this in their search parameters.
In general, users find more relevant and valuable results when adding more search parameters, and would be more likely to continue their search.
With this in mind, I asked myself if I could create a way for users to input information while keeping my form simple and accessible.
This meant creating a completely different method of “advanced search”. Designing a button that said “Add more details” gave users the option to simply add additional information.
Unfortunately, initial usability testing showed that the button wasn’t enough. Users knew how to add details, but it wasn’t clear what sort of information they could add. I then made another change and replaced the button with a dynamic experience. I showed users what kind of data they can add to every step of their search, and I viewed them as clues left for the users. I was able to preserve the functionality, providing only relevant fields as the users continued their search. The main solution was to use tags that were visible to the user during a search.
Too many fish you can’t see the ocean
On one of my dives in Thailand, I remember an abundance of fish. I was surrounded. This was fun for a little bit but the overall experience was mediocre. Concentrating and paying attention to the details was impossible. To this day I can’t tell you any details about that particular dive, but it was still fun.
There are two methods for searching historical records on our search engine’s:
- Broad/general search
- Category search, e.g., military documents, birth certificates, etc.
There are significantly fewer searches by category than general searches. While lists help users understand each category, long lists typically diminish the ability to take action. Users have been overwhelmed by a myriad of information. I decided to turn that long list into clean cards with eye-catching visuals.
To modernize the search experience, it was important for me to have a well-built infrastructure — a method for revealing content.
“Put the information where people already are…if it’s not, people aren’t gonna see it” Gregg Bernstein
Dynamic search experience
I wanted to encourage users to continue their research.
With the previous design, adjusting a search query was a bit frustrating for our users. It was easier for them to start over from scratch than to edit their previous search, a process that led many users to abandon the site. This is exactly why a cumbersome experience was out of the question when editing a search.
I wished to facilitate our users’ experience by shortening the learning curve, removing any need for them to learn a new approach. I leveraged the search component I previously designed from the search page and pinned it to the top of the results page.
Results component
It was important for me to change the search results interface, improving scalability and readability. My goal was to create results that are easier to compare.
Making these improvements required several steps:
- Improve scanability and readability of text by placing the text on the left and the image on the right.
- Emphasize results that have photos of people and records.
- Reduce clutter by removing non-essential design elements.
Gasping for air
The new design was A/B tested against the old one and we saw an increase in several important metrics such as searches, editing searches, etc. Unfortunately, we also noticed less people clicked to view the results themselves. All of this meant my new design was not precise or ready to be released.
The old version had the links to the results clearly marked with a tacky blue underline. In the new design, I tried a more subtle design, using cards with a delicate shadow effect as well as a more visually appealing underline. It’s possible that it wasn’t clear enough for people that these cards are clickable. I tried to find a quick fix for the drop in clicks. An efficient solution to help people understand the results are clickable was to add a button, which might not be a very subtle design solution; however, immediately the click through rate soared.
The trickiest part of diving is maintaining buoyancy. Divers rise and fall several meters every time they take a breath. Having a proper breathing technique is a diver’s most effective way to preserve their energy and have a perfect diving experience.
By addressing usability issues, we improved the quality of the user experience. Our simplification of the process worked great. After seeing the increased engagement, our final touch-ups showed improvements in all the KPIs we have set for this redesign. This part of my diving expedition was coming to an end.
Aesthetics is an essential factor for success for any product, but striking the right balance between minimalism and functionality can be tricky. Minimalist design is about getting rid of redundant features and components, stripping the product down to its essential elements. Knowing this pushes me to create great user experiences that can bring true business growth. I believe that any designer who does this can call themselves a UX Strategist. So take a breath, and dive in.
