Ancestry: Onboarding (Growth)
Senior Product Growth Designer • Nov 2021 – May 2025 • San Francisco, CA
1. WIREFRAMES & PROTOTYPES: After completing user research, I led the wireframe design of a full onboarding experience. Leadership selected a long-form, educational approach inspired by Noom, utilizing conversational language and progressive disclosure. I then created interactive prototypes and conducted user testing to validate flows and iterate on the design. We started with a mobile first mindset.
2. UI Exploration & Prototyping: Once the wireframes were finalized, I led UI exploration by consolidating Ancestry's three existing design systems into a single, cohesive design language. I created high-fidelity prototypes to test visuals, interactions, and usability, allowing for continued user validation and iteration.
3. FINAL DESIGNS: We gathered all feedback, iterated the flows and started on final UI. We decided to keep the UI as clean as possible to help the team move faster and for increased ease of use for Ancestry's demographic, which leaned older. This decision proved to be very effective in continued testing and shipping over the next 3 years.
4. DESIGN SYSTEM: The Eng team wanted to refactor the code base which gave us an opportunity to implement an updated Design system. I worked closely with the Head of Growth and the Dev team to hit an aggressive 2 month timeline. We built and scaled a company-wide Figma design system (43 components) grounded in WCAG standards, reducing QA time by 30%. and handoff by 15%
4. TESTING AND ITERATION: Our team led rapid, two-week sprint cycles combining user interviews, usability testing, and A/B experiments. We continuously refined flows based on data and feedback, focusing on simplicity, clarity, and Human-Centered Design principles. Every design decision was validated against performance metrics and user behavior.
