Related App
Find out if you are related to your friends!
The beginning
Wouldn't it be cool if we could find out how we are related to people around us? We added the ability to our app. Users could find out how they are related to people within 100 feet of them. People loved finding new relatives. So we thought, "Let's take to the next level."
Expanding
Our company hosts a annual family history conference called RootsTech. We enabled everyone at the conference to see if they were related to other attendees. Boy, did they love this feature. It became in high demand and we had to spin up more servers to keep it running. We didn't expect the demand for this feature.
Expanding, again
This time we had the idea to allow RootsTech attendees to send invites to their friends to see how they are related to them. This one button brought in so much traffic we had to remove it the next day. And one of the most asked questions at the conference that day was "How do I send my friends an invite to see how we are related." Needless to say, people loved it.
Meeting business goals and user opportunities
Year after year we decide to expand upon this one idea because on average people will add eight new people to the Family Tree to find out how they are related to their friends. Building the tree is something the business wants and finding out how one is related to their friends is something users want. A perfect match.
Expanding even more
The next time around we decided to add how attendees are related to famous people. This was also very popular. Trees were being built and connections were being made.
Combining ideas
What if we took all these ideas and combined them into one experience where users could find out how they were related to famous people and their friends at any time? And the Related app idea was started.
We knew end users saw value in seeing how they are related to famous people and friends. We knew the business saw value in investing in this because people would be added to the tree.
We also had a strategic opportunity to show how we could leverage Facebook's Graph API to show how we could give their users meaningful experiences.
We also just finished building a beginner experience for adding people to the tree that increased the likelihood of people connecting to their ancestors significantly. This was a critical part to making this app successful.
Problems to solve
Are people going to question how relationships are calculated?
This prototype didn't have users actually build a tree to just knowing a tree has to be built made users realize that relationships are calculated using a tree.
Is the overall flow of the app working for people?
Surprisingly, yes. creating and account, adding a tree, seeing relatives, adding friends seeing friends who are relatives makes sense to people.
When do we invite people to enable notifications? Before or after showing value?
Still up for debate. Some people said they wouldn't enable notifications and some would. I need to do further testing here.
Beta prototype
We are currently working on a beta prototype to test further questions and see how all the pieces are working together.