Mark Allen is a User Experience Designer passionate about making the Internet awesome.
Shoebox January 2008
As Ancestry.com users increasingly added photos, stories, videos and historical records to various sections of the site, it became important to have a central repository for all their data. The Shoebox is a site-wide media manager that makes it easy to add, organize and push user generated content to the family trees, self-publishing projects and other Ancestry users.
Picker January 2008
This tool allows users to add content from their Shoebox to pages on Ancestry.com. In this screenshot, the user is adding items from their Shoebox to a person in their family tree.
Person card December 2007
A recent Foresee survey found that over 50% of Ancestry.com users had multiple windows open when searching for historical records (one window for search results, one window for their family tree). This “person card” allows the searcher to browse through search results while comparing them to people in their tree, all in one window.
Facebook App November 2007
This Facebook app was designed to target people with a casual interest in their family history and also to test the viability of genealogical Facebook applications.
UXrepublic November 2007
Nearly every web designer has a giant folder on their hard drive full of screenshots they’ve taken to document designs they like. I got tired of trying to remember months later why I took a screenshot, so I built UXrepublic. It allows people to organize their screenshots and share them with other designers. I also wrote a Firefox extension that takes screenshots in your browser and uploads them for you. I think it is pretty cool, although very much still a work in progress.
Family View September 2007
For nearly the entire time I have worked at Ancestry.com, I’ve wanted to build a lightweight view of your family tree that was easy to navigate and gave you a richer look at the people in your tree than our traditional pedigree view offered. It wasn’t until Geni.com started to gain some traction that I was able to design this Flash-based product.
Ancestry Press August 2007
This is 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, the 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 of 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.
Place Pages April 2007
Genealogists usually focus their research on names and dates. When they get stuck, peripheral information about the world their ancestors lived in can help them discover new clues. These information-dense pages were designed to provide information about geographic locations with the ability to filter data down to specific time periods. They are also a great way to surface Ancestry content that is not easily discovered through normal search queries.
Pedigree View March 2007
This view of your family tree is one of the core experiences on Ancestry.com. Since this view is the primary way to navigate your family tree, the biggest challenge in designing this page was to improve the features of our old pedigree view without destroying the functionality and navigation paths that people depended on. It was heavily tested in usability labs and in-home customer visits before going live.
Person profileFebruary 2007
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 Person page, and it needs to capture the person’s life in a compelling manor. At the time it was the most ambitious page we had ever built at Ancestry, and helped lay the groundwork for everything else I have done at the company.
