To show a real-world user engagement and to capture emotions over time, I created a journey map. This was based on user observations, interviews, testing and app store feedback.

After 2 years, the FamilySearch mobile app was becoming feature rich and difficult to navigate. We observed users navigating to dead ends that made it difficult to move through the app in a fluid and cohesive way. After some white-boarding, and wireframing, a new flow was presented to the PM and team. After further refinement, a build was created to conduct additional user testing.

There was a desire among many of us on the UX FamilySearch team to understand the younger market segment. We began doing some contextual inquiry to understand how the 12-18 year olds spend their free time. Questions were formulated for this segment, and those who worked with them (including family therapist, teachers and youth advisors).

Once the interviews were complete, we created an affinity of their responses. From these we created statements that helped us understand clearly the barriers youth have pertaining to family history. 

A couple statements surfaced: 

"Youth have busy schedules, so in their free time they gravitate to "mindless—movies, apps, youtube—activities for a break."

"Without a social element, youth are less likely to be engaged."

These statements will be shared with upper management to help inform decisions in our future product cycles.

Design Explorations

Additional work to consider for the future: Intro screens, in app helps, on-boarding, map my ancestors, audio v3, and removing someone from a family.

One metric we were paying attention to was retention over time. We noticed that we had a certain set of users (about 16k per day) that were die hard. We also had new users that were about 3k per day that were not using the app over time. This informed our decisions on which features to release. One of those was an enhanced audio experience. We saw this as a great way to capitalize on the power of the device.