Gamification for family history

Hypothesis to test

Breaking down some suggested next actions into step by step missions or tasks, would give the users a road map to continue their journey and set them up for success. Ultimately increasing their satisfaction with the product and leading to an increase in subscriptions.

The success from the onboarding journey and its simple step by step approach helped with the building of this initial hypothesis.

• Does this chunked down approach work post onboarding to help get users into the product?
• Users want general information to flesh out their knowledge of the times and places their ancestors lived (eg. what happened in my grandfathers town when he was alive?), does this dilute their experience in the product or should it be more focussed on only their family?
• Does having an achievement type approach work for users? If so at what level is this needed within the structure of these tasks?
• Is there a chance to educate users on the nuances of this hobby in the hobby?

Mapping out Journeys and research

The first problem to solve in designing these extra journeys was to try to understand the typical casual users mental model when it came to people they wanted to trace back to in their family history.  I mapped out several tasks a user could do post our onboarding journey, exploring lo fidelity screens in Whimsical, an online tool which I also used for digitising the journey maps and decision trees.

These potential journeys were tested and from this feedback we moved onto a more detailed journeys

Iterating on user feedback

We selected a few missions for our user testing sessions to let users to select select, in the user testing session we set the scene by having them onboard on the live product, switching to Invision to test one of three journeys.  The journeys were created in a higher fidelity in Sketch.

Findings from this round of testing affected the design in the following ways:

• users found the achievement aspect patronising, so we dropped it
• we moved the concept away from an achievement focused set of tasks, to more around a creating a narrative for the user
• reduced ‘general’ content as this diluted from the family messaging
• changed each mission to end at the users family tree so they could see the progress they made (whether that be new family members added or photos of themselves or their family added)
• the length of each task was about right

Finalising designs for the MVP build

Working with the engineering team and PM we de-scoped some of the more technically challenging missions for a later release.  The MVP focussed on what quick to build missions we could deliver that helped the user develop their story and personalise their family tree within the product.

With 5 missions defined, these were refined along with a quick introduction to the concepts of missions and built to launch on the site.  We planned to experiment with cohorts who would see the missions on site and intend to measure the engagement on site along with the user retention to gauge the success of the product. Iterations were planned so we could build the more technically complex missions, should the experiment go the way we thought.

Once these MVPs were in development I had accepted another job offer and handed over the iteration work to another designer in the team. These were launched with minimal changes to the designs I’ve presented here.