A way to connect individuals and families through storytelling.
This case study documents the FamilySearch Story Stitcher app design process for a platform that serves a global audience seeking to connect with their family history. This effort focused on improving user experience, enhancing accessibility, and addressing key usability challenges.
Role
As the Lead UX Designer, I was responsible for conducting user research, creating wire-frames and prototypes, visual design, interaction design, documentation, and overseeing usability testing. I collaborated with developers, product managers and stakeholders to deliver the final design.
Problem
The FamilySearch team wanted to create a product that would reach and introduce family history to people who are not familiar with it. The FamilySearch platform faced issues with user engagement and navigation complexity. Many users, particularly those new to genealogy research, found it difficult to locate and utilize key features. This sprint aimed to create a more intuitive, visually appealing, and efficient experience for users of varying technological proficiency.
Timeline
We used the Google Sprint format to nail down the majority of the process documented in this case study with a few additional days validating the design and gathering feedback.
Findings
• Individuals and families find connection through sharing personal stories.
• Mobile-first: leverage the tools smartphones provide outside of the app you are building, IE. text messages, photo storage, etc.
• Mobile-first: leverage the tools smartphones provide outside of the app you are building, IE. text messages, photo storage, etc.
We sat down as a virtual team and captured on the board all the perspectives we had on long-term vision and goals. These artifacts were captured in Mural.
Once we had our long-term vision defined we conducted interviews with users and experts.
My interview notes above and the guiding questions in yellow were extracted from each interview session.
We reconciled all of our statements and ordered them.
Map and Target: This blue map is the map of our theoretical user journey, meant to consolidate our thinking from the interviews and HMW exercises.
Lightning Demos: we looked outside of our organization for products and patterns that reflected our progress.
The Four-Step Sketch is a process where you very quickly distill a collection of notes to a Solution Sketch.
Solution Sketch encapsulates three main concepts on sticky notes and descriptive text beside. Mine was an app that would allow others to tell a story through mobile devices, and share the storytelling experience with loved ones.
Art Museum and Critique: The group used different types of dots for feedback and voting. My solution was chosen for prototyping.
I consolidated all the points the group made on what would be key steps to address in the experience.
This is the storyboard I illustrated to capture each step we would need to build into the prototype.
I created the wire-frames that reflected the pattern established in the story-boarding exercise.