Ancestry.com

Provo, UT
Flagship web service of $140-million parent company, The Generations Network, Inc.

Used Continuous SyncDev to make quarterly updates to this data-rich site that feeds other TGN products.

The eight-member design, engineering, and marketing team, led by a Product GM, kicked off SyncDev in mid-May. They were testing their next-generation service especially to see if customers would buy data-product add-ons to their basic service. They met with twenty-two customers, men and women over fifty, at their homes in their living rooms, studies, and even bedrooms, i.e., wherever customers used their computers. By June 30th, they had revised their design several times.

Upon seeing a web page offering about a new data service one customer remarked, “I wouldn’t buy this Civil War database for $95. The wording is too vague to know if my Georgian ancestors would be in it.” The web designer, sitting in the back of the room, typed on his keyboard presumably taking meeting notes. Fifteen minutes later he asked the customer to refresh the products page. “Oh, yes. I would definitely buy that,” she said. Instead of taking notes he had redesigned the page, found a neighbor’s Wi-Fi, uploaded his new page, and got the customer to refresh it.
In essence, the team saw a problem, designed a fix in real-time, tested, and then implemented it. Had the team not been there in situ with the customer, where seeing is believing, the problems they saw may never have been detected, let alone fixed.