Ordinances Ready

On Ancestry

The direction
Our team was challenged with the request to "put Ordinances Ready" on Ancestry. Let's allow patrons to quickly submit for temple work on Ancestry. What if a patron never has to go to FamilySearch to take a name to the temple?

Dreamin' big
We started to mock up what this might look like for patrons. They could easily connect their accounts. The system would magically analyze the trees and check for duplicates. Then the user could click a temple button and a FamilySearch window would open. The patron could see all the ordinances that are available in their Ancestry and FamilySearch trees. And they could print a name right from the pop up on Ancestry.

How would this vision work technically?

Option 1: Expensive, but slick
We could rearchitect the whole system. Instead of the ordinances and the ancestors being in the same database we separate them. Create a database would hold all the ordinance information as well as a "handprint" of each person in the tree. And then all the tree databases could refer to that database to check if ordinances are available.

Pros: Gives an ideal user experience.
Cons: Extremely expensive, requires company buy-in.

Option 2: Piggyback off another project
This option would allow users upload their trees from a third-party site into our Controlled Edit Tree space. Have this tree check with the Family Tree database of duplicates and ordinances and then allow the user to add any new people to the Family Tree and reserve ordinances.

Pros: Moderately expensive, gives a good user experience.
Cons: Slightly more complicated for the user.

Option 3: Messy, but cheap
Allow the user to generate a report from the third-party tree that could be uploaded the the the Family Tree. Then the patron could add any new people and reserve ordinances.

Pros: Much less expensive, some features already exist.
Cons: features that exsist need improvement, not great user experience.

The proposed solution
As time moved on we learned of another idea in the works on another team. Controlled Edit Trees now had the requirement to allow ordinances to be done for any private tree. This is exact problem we were facing. In their discovery of options they came to the same conclusions we came to. The best experience would be option 1.

Patrons would be able to upload their third-party trees and the system would show available ordinances and check for duplicates for all the trees on FamilySearch.

Discovering user and business goals

The business goal
After many discussions we finally landed on the business outcomes for this vision. Enable patrons to have access to more names and trees for temple work. This goes beyond what is available in FamilySearch and includes bringing names and trees from third-party platforms.

The user goal
Through user research we learned patrons wanted a space where they could share their research with others without people changing it. They wanted a family tree they could build that would be open for others to view but allow certain people to edit it. Patrons want to be able to access these trees for temple work.

Moving forward
Now that we have a clear business and user goals we can work toward an experience that will work for users and reach our business objectives.

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