Mark Allen Interaction Designer

Content Viewer

Ancestry.com has over 6 billion historical records, and are the primary reason people subscribe to the site. This content viewer is an improved way to interact with these records. It features a transcribed index of the image, a tool to correct errors, information about who else has interacted with the record, and various sharing tools.

Ancestry.com Tree to Go

I am the designer and product manager for the Ancestry.com iPhone app. In the first three months since its release, over 150,000 people have installed the app and it currently is #14 in the iTunes Reference category and has been a significant driver in new Ancestry.com registrations.

Learn more about Tree to Go

Ancestry Press

One of my favorite products I designed at Ancestry.com. After two failed attempts (one acquired startup, one outsourced product) at building a self-publishing tool, our commerce team approached me to design a tool that allowed users to take the content they’ve added into their family trees and create professionally printed and hard-bound books. In less than one month after its launch, the new version of the tool had more books created and sold than the old version had in the previous six months. The tool is now being being offered as a white label service to photo sharing sites and other publishing companies.

Family Tree Profile

This is the most heavily visited page on Ancestry.com, and the centerpiece of the Family Trees product. Everything you have found about an ancestor lives on a profile page, and it needs to capture the person’s life in a compelling manor. When I designed this in early 2007 it was the most ambitious page we had ever built at Ancestry.com, and helped lay the groundwork for everything else I have done at the company.

Community Profile

One of the big challenges I’ve been working on the past year has been helping Ancestry.com members connect with each other. This member profile page aggregates your site activity into one place so other members can quickly learn more about your research interests and activities.

Member Connect

Ancestry.com’s audience is unique in that it skews much older and less computer savvy that the general public. They are generally resistant to anything that makes their research tools feel too “social.” Member Connect was an initiative to bring the benefits of social research to our users without scaring them away. Heavy emphasis was placed on privacy controls along with ease of use. It has worked very well and in an unexpected but amazing side effect reunited dozens of sets of long–lost siblings.

Family View

An alternative to the traditional “pedigree” style of navigating a family tree, this view focuses more on immediate families than ancestors and provides opportunities to display more information such as photos and vital events. This method has helped new users and inexperienced genealogists start entering the information they know about their family rather than worrying about how far back they can go in their tree.

Shoebox

As more people started moving their research from traditional desktop software to online services such as Ancestry.com, it became clear that we needed to improve the ways to organize all of the photos, stories and historical records people people were uploading. The Shoebox makes it easy to access all of your content on Ancestry wherever you are in your family tree.

Loupe

My first iPhone app, Loupe makes it easy to create color palettes from real-world items. This was created mostly as an opportunity to learn how developing and distributing apps on the iPhone works, and also solved a problem I have as a designer. Loupe was listed as app number one on Designer Daily's 11 essential iPhone apps for designers

Visit Loupe's website

Triplo.gs

Currently still in development, Triplo.gs is a social site for adventurers to share their stories, photos, routes and gear lists.

Tweetletes

I built this partly as an excuse to learn the Twitter API and partly because I'm fascinated with how public figures are using social tools such as Twitter to interact with their fans. While it started off as just a sandbox experiment, Tweetletes now tracks over 1,000 professional athletes on Twitter and has been so successful that the development needs have outpaced my PHP abilities.

Visit Tweetletes

WebSort marketing site

Card sorting is a very powerful Information Architecture tool, and WebSort is the best way to do a card sorting study on the internet. I designed this site to serve as a marketing and educational tool for LimeChile's excellent web app.

Visit Websort