Finding a new product at Findmypast

A bit of context‍

Findmypast is an online tool that stores millions of records (birth & marriage certificates, war records, etc...). Genealogists often pay for a monthly subscription and spend years researching their family history and putting together a family tree. Most people I talked with, had managed to find out about their ancestors back in the XI century. There was a woman who was related to the Lord Edward, a man that was after a record to prove he was related to Elvis, and many others that were amazed by newspaper articles that told them their ancestors were famous musicians, or criminals, or have had a comic way of dying.

I was amazed about these discoveries too. It had never occurred to me that you could get so much knowledge about your roots using a website. And most people that aren't in their 60's or just retired probably never thought about it either. That was exactly what we were trying to change. How could we make non-genealogists interested in learning more about their past?

Why were we doing this? After conducting a market research, the product team realised that the family history market could cover way more audiences than just genealogists, and that it was a good way of competing with the main genealogy companies out there. That is when I came in and joined the "new product" team together with Helen, the UX research lead, and Alex, the product owner. ‍

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Talking to Genealogists and their families

There were some critical questions to answer that led our research:
1. Can we win with our data? 
2. Who will be the early adopter?
3. What does the wider market care about? 

We first needed to understand what makes people interested in knowing more about their ancestors. And what type of data was more engaging to each age group. We started interviewing genealogists, and we realised the main triggers for them to start researching were the death of a close relative, the birth of a new family member, or retirement. They were driven by the fear of missing their family stories, and having a lot of free time.
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After talking to genealogists, we contacted their family members and listen to their opinion on all these findings. We printed out all different types of content (records, photos, articles) and got each member of the family to rate them from not interesting at all, to very interesting.

We discovered they mostly cared about:

- Similarities (lookalikes, common interests)

- Migration stories, (it's interesting to know how far we went) 

- Professions, (specially if it was a weird one like "bird picker") 

- Quirky or morbid stories like criminals in the family, or funny death stories.

They cared about their ancestors until the second great grandparent. After that, there was almost no emotional impact unless they shared some similarities (eg. love for music). The dynamics between young children 4-8 years old and their grandparents were a bit different, they both were looking for a connection so they were very interested in their similarities and differences growing up.

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Funny enough, sometimes genealogists were more interested in knowing if they were related to Queen Victoria, than knowing if their great grandfather migrated to New York. For them, researching their history had become a game, almost an addiction in some cases. And the way of sharing their findings with their family members didn't appear to be very engaging. So we arrived to our first clear conclusion: Genealogists were trying to get their family members interested in these stories, but they didn't have the tools of good storytelling to transform their artefacts and make them interesting enough for their family to engage.
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Co-creation and testing

We synthesised all this information and presented it to everyone in the company to run an ideation session. From that we got up to 50 different concepts and voted the ones that were more aligned to the users needs and context we presented.

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After this session, I prepared many prototypes that we were showing to the the families. Sometimes they would evolved into a refined idea, and sometimes I was updating low fi versions during the day based on their reactions. Some examples: 

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The whole process was very emotional. Everyone seemed to care about these discoveries, so we hold into the idea that there was a market fit for "family history storytelling experiences". But we were making a huge assumption. We needed to believe that this new audience was going to put the effort into searching for, or discovering this new product to find out about their family history.

Soon we had to admit that this wasn't the right assumption to make, but the complete opposite. Instead, we assumed this audience would not start using some new product. Therefore, the only alternative we had, was to share all these stories using products they were familiar with already. Then is when we started pivoting.

You probably guessed it already, and you probably have a family group on it yourself. We used Facebook for this new testing phase.

How? We gave genealogists a series of artefacts to share in their family groups and monitored the reactions and comments of the family members. Genealogists were sharing things like audio stories, interactive family trees, lookalike "contests", and so on. And family members were very engaged with these posts at the beginning, but seemed to lose interest with time.

The trigger

It was clear to us that all the content genealogists were collecting was extremely valuable, and all family members wanted to keep it safe. But it was also clear that this "wider audience" didn't care about finding or accessing this content at this particular moment of their lives. Sometimes they were doing it just because they felt sad for all the effort the genealogist/initiator was putting on it.

So we came to the conclusion that we needed to work on a new area of the core product that genealogists use. Since they were the only "trigger" we could find for the rest of the family to get interested in their past stories. This area should help genealogists collect and share information with the family through platforms they already use.

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Conclusion

During my time at findmypast my most valuable learnings were

- Test your ideas with the right audience, even if it takes you longer to find someone, don't just go to a coffee shop to ask people about their family history.

- Know when to stop trying, and don't get too attached to the concepts that you're working on

- Think beyond the experience of using the product. People might love your product when you show it to them, but if they don't discover it, it doesn't really matter.

- Think about the power of familiar tools before creating your own new thing.

- Content and co-creation workshops with users are really really insightful.

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Thanks for reading!