Hint Card Design System

Role

UX Designer
2022-23

Tools

Figma
Ethnio

Skills

User Research
UI Design
UX Design
Prototyping
Split Testing

The Opportunity

As part of a broader strategic initiative, I conducted foundational user research that showed new users often struggled to develop a strong interest in Ancestry’s hint recommendations. As a result, the team aimed to increase the percentage of newer users who made at least one recommendation decision per day.

Metrics revealed that over forty percent of active newer users didn’t interact with the hint recommendations available to them. Additional interviews suggested that new users often entered the product with optimistic expectations. However, their pain and frustration quickly escalated as they progressed through our recommendation flywheel.

The team identified several possible causes for this negative sentiment. After some consideration, inconsistent UI emerged as a top hypothesis.

An audit revealed a patchwork of mismatched visual styles that had manifested over time. The team hypothesized that the inconsistent interface hindered users’ ability to learn key concepts that helped them become successful. Accordingly, I began exploring ways to improve and normalize how recommendations appeared across the full product experience.

Design & Iteration

I led the effort to formulate a hint card design system with a design partner. We used insights from established user research to guide our decision-making. Explorations aimed to

• Improve the information hierarchy. A series of user interviews suggested that the existing hierarchy did not align with common evaluation behaviors. As a result, several card elements shifted position and emphasis.
• Simplify the information in the card. I aimed to simplify or remove less relevant information. 
• Clean up and standardize the visual display. Create a more consistent and clean experience across the full spectrum of pages and devices. 
• Comply with WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards and accommodate several different languages.

After honing in on top questions and concepts, I conducted a series of interviews with customers who had varying levels of skill. Some themes emerged. The participants:

• expressed mixed feelings about the dark colored heading in one of the prototypes. Users often felt the bar helped them distinguish the cards from one another. However, they also remarked that the bars created distracting visual breaks— especially when viewing the cards in a web form factor.
• often responded positively to the simplified category name. Both new and experienced participants commonly expressed that this adjustment improved their ability to scan and digest card information. 
  
• misinterpreted the placeholder pictogram graphics in one of the prototypes. Surprisingly, participants sometimes incorrectly thought the pictograms signified a status.
• expressed mixed feelings about attempts to improve the information hierarchy in the table of information. Several participants expressed enthusiasm the reformatted data. They remarked that it helped them focus better on the essentials. While others felt the proposed changes distracted them.

The team digested and leveraged this feedback to shape future iterations. I conducted several additional rounds of user interviews to refine the design and ensure it scaled across a wide range of experiences. With rapid iteration and testing in mind, we moved forward with implementating and testing its most promising aspects.

Implementation & Learnings

I partnered with Product Management to devise a split test that aimed to answer our most pressing questions. We settled on a dual variant test. One variant applied some UI updates to the existing card structure. The other altered the hierarchy of the card by introducing the simplified category treatment.

We primarily tracked the percentage of less experienced users reviewing hints. We monitored several guardrail and informing metrics as well. The team considered a flat result as a success. We did not expect a systemic change like this to yield significant short-term gains. The benefits of this change would likely manifest over a longer stretch of time.

Before & After

Slide the divider horizontally to view the improvements

Results & Next Steps

After running the test for three weeks, it revealed several insightful statistically significant results:

• Overall, both variants yielded flat results. The team anticipated this outcome and regarded it as a positive outcome.
• The first variant that cleaned up the UI increased several secondary metrics by nearly one percent.
• The variant that introduced the simplified headers was also flat but caused a two percent decline in total hint recommendations reviewed.

We immediately released the first variant to all users.

The team discussed why the simplified headers led to users reviewing fewer hint recommendations. We hypothesized that because the simplified headers made hint cards easier to scan, users could more easily identify and skip over repetitive information.

Previous studies revealed that repetitive information led many users to feel less enthusiastic about interacting with their recommendations. Accordingly, the team decided to pair the simplified headings with future experiments that aimed to draw attention to especially unique, helpful and interesting information within a recommendation.

What I Learned

• UI simplifications can expose and exacerbate underlying pain points. While the UI simplifications seemed to make it easier to scan and absorb recommendation information, they also seemed to make it easier for users to pick out less desireable repetitive information.    
• Think more systematically. In the past, my work often focused on a specific feature, product area or use case. This project encouraged me to think more broadly to ensure the designs scaled across a wide assortment of workflows and displays.

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