Ancestry + UserTesting

With the guidance of leaders like Maria Cuasay and Vlad Makarov, Director of User Research and Consumer Insights, Ancestry formed the Growth Team to understand how they could better convert people using the free trial into paying customers. The Growth Team worked with the UserTesting platform to test the free trial with prospective customers so they could understand where and why the drop-offs were occurring. 

Kate Lapres, Product Manager, Growth, explains a bit about what they learned. “People know the Ancestry brand, but have very little familiarity with how it works or why they needed to build a family tree to get value. We also saw a number of small friction points that were preventing users from getting through the flow, preventing them from actually getting value out of the product. That could be something as simple as ‘I can't remember my grandmother's birthday’ and ‘I don't  want to leave the experience and call my mom to get it’ or can be something as big as ‘I don't really understand why I need to build this tree in the first place and what value this is getting for me.’”

As the team ran their studies, they realized they needed to set expectations more clearly and demonstrate the value of the product early on. This way, the digital experience would show off what Ancestry provides for new customers as they move through the trial version.

After the Growth Team completed their experiments with UserTesting, the engineers and designers got to work. Kate says, “The new free trial experience not only looks cleaner, it looks simpler. People are more willing to move through it because they're getting more information back for what they're putting into it.”

Ultimately, Ancestry’s sharp new trial experience led to a 20% decrease in day one cancellations. Overall revenue from new users increased by a staggering 6%, a huge win for the company. 

Per Maria Cuasay, “We help limit risk by coming up with higher quality ideas. Without user research, our ideas are going to be all over the place and we're not really solving the main customer problem. But with really good research, we're able to hone down on the most important customer problems or what we call opportunities. Our ideas become a lot better and we have more successful experiments.”

Next up, Ancestry’s Growth Team plans to use the EnjoyHQ function to gather customer insights from UserTesting and other sources. This will allow executives to access the summaries they need about user perceptions and employees can use the hub to quickly find the information they seek.