In 2021, FamilyTreeDNA was acquired by myDNA. With a new CEO at the helm, the first objective became to address ongoing customer complaints about the website's usability.
Multiple teams, including the UX team, were tasked to compile reports with insights on problems and solutions to improve the customer experience.
Below is a summary of the approach my team and I took to undergo a holistic audit of FamilyTreeDNA's web application which includes legacy products in only 2 weeks.
Although FamilyTreeDNA was the first to introduce consumer DNA testing, they had fallen behind in the customer experience and keeping up with other competitors such as 23andMe and Ancestry.
Over the previous few years, feedback like the one below, had been on the rise as customer engagement data, satisfaction scores and overall sales had steadily dropped.
"She doesn't like FamilyTreeDNA because it's not as user friendly as Ancestry and wants to abandon her account."
The spotlight was on our team. It was a chance to demonstrate the UX team's expertise and finally voice our concerns directly to the CEO and upper-level management.
In the past, we'd usually focused on only one product design project at a time. This was the first time we'd work on a holistic review of the suite of products within the web application.
Time was against us, as there were 30+ product applications to review on the website. As a team of three, we decided to constrain the audit according to time restrictions and business initiatives for that quarter:
To get an overall picture of what's going on, the audit would need to cover a variety of metrics. With just one week to research and another week to compile and present the report, we agreed to conduct research that was easily accessible.
Identifying Users to Focus On
This was one of the more challenging constraints since there are many types of users who use similar products but have different access levels within the website. We focused on a subset of users and broke them down further as our research progressed:
A.) New Users
B.) Users for the top products only
Stakeholder Interviews
I spoke with various stakeholders (R&D team, Customer Support, Engineers, QA Manager) who touch base with consumers on a regular basis. I tried to target my interviews with people who were frequently putting out fires because they would have excellent knowledge of where the most serious usability concerns existed. These interviews also helped us hone in even further to match up with our quantitative data.
"Customers are confused by all the different places to view their results. Then how to use the results."
User Flows
We used our data analytic tools, ContentSquare and Google Analytics, to capture the most trafficked user journey. We analyzed the data for each step to see where users drop off, load times, which pages have the highest bounce rates, and how long users stayed on a page.
We tried to go back far enough in the analytics to see patterns rather than simply seeing individual data points.
Behavioral Metrics
Once we had an idea of the key user journeys, I was able to dig into the areas where users engaging with the website via video recordings using ContentSquare. This is the step where we uncovered more of the WHY and saw what users were struggling with.
Heuristic Analysis
We looked for usability issues and ways to improve the top products and user flows on both desktop and mobile.
I followed a template based on Neilson Norman Group on the "10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design."
We found that the website had many usability problems and broke them down into five critical UX themes:
Historically, FamilyTreeDNA has designed and developed one product at a time, typically while working in silo'd teams. With almost of 20 years of operating this way, it opened up many legacy headaches as it scaled.
What started as a quarterly initiatives to tackle customer experience issues, was turning out to be a bigger monster that would require an extensive overhaul.
In the meantime, I put together a summary of the findings and suggestions what we could conservatively complete within the quarterly timeframe.
This audit allowed us to get a better look at the overall picture of the legacy challenges at hand:
The audit helped create a design roadmap for both short-term and long-term projects. Our team immediately hit the ground running to tackle low-hanging fruit opportunities uncovered, including the implementation of a new Help Center. This report also served as a baseline to check back and measure progress for future initiatives.
