Systems Design: Ancestry Growth Team Style Guide
Senior Product Designer (Growth) • Nov 2021 – May 2025 • San Francisco, CA
Challenge: The initial Growth team onboarding experience was designed by 4–5 different designers using 3 separate design systems, resulting in significant inconsistency. When Engineering flagged the messy codebase and proposed a full refactor, I seized the opportunity to consolidate and modernize the design system. We established a clean, consistent, and scalable foundations aligned tightly with the new codebase. This created a unified, efficient system for both design and development and helped accelerate delivery to meet aggressive timelines and testing cadence.
We focused on a mobile first approach. We leveraged existing style guides but greatly reduced fonts, font sizes, colors and inconsistencies. We leverage Material design standards for all components, interactions and page grids. We updated and consolidated icons, images and illustrations to have a more consistent feel. We worked closely with Engineering to implement a pixel perfect build. In the end we had a living and breathing style guide on a new clean code base.
Developing a style guide for a company as large as Ancestry was a significant undertaking. In close collaboration with Product and Development teams, we completed the unified style guide in just over four months, enabling consistent experiences across the Growth Team stack including the following projects. ONBOARDING FLOW. By carefully updating and testing the designs using the new style guide, we achieved an 18% higher conversion rate and accelerated shipping by 60%.
LOHP QUESTIONNAIRE: Marketing built an experience for the Ancestry homepage to get users to sign up for a plan and into the tree building experience. We took over the flow to unify it with the Onboarding experience and to be a more in-depth and seamless experience. It led to a 16% increase in conversion and the ability to test often and quickly.
FAMILY PLAN: This was built in partnership with the Social and Collaboration team to better help users to invite family members to the Family Plan they signed up for in onboarding. The experience was consistent with onboarding styles and led to an 8% conversion rate.
FAMILY GROUPS: Built in partnership with the Social and Collaboration team to better help users invite family members and friends to their family tree they built in onboarding and share the discoveries they made. It made the experience consistent with onboarding and led to a 5% higher conversion rate in invitations accepted.
YEAR IN REVIEW: Built in partnership with the Social and Collaboration team to give users a snapshot of their accomplishments and discoveries on Ancestry. This was a feature that was previously available but the updated design led to a 55% increase in user engagement! Also we expanded on the styles as all style guides should be living and breathing documents.
OUTCOME: We established a unified style guide that ensured visual and functional consistency across Ancestry's products and teams. By streamlining designs, workflows, and cross-functional collaboration, we significantly enhanced the team's ability to build effectively and efficiently. Through close partnership, we delivered this solution quickly and successfully.
