Findmypast | 1939 Register
UX/UI Design for the 1939 Register transcript and payment journey
Intro to this project
In 2015, working as a mid-weight UX/UI Designer, I joined this project at a moment when both design practice and my own skills looked quite different from today.
It was a formative one. Going out with high-fidelity designs and watching users struggle made it viscerally clear how much work clarity of purpose does. We had to rethink the page radically before users could understand what was being sold. That lesson has stayed with me.
It was also, genuinely, a joy. Being part of a new record release and contributing something to a project that creative felt like a privilege.
Initial rapid discovery phase
We started off by creating initial wireframes and testing them with users. We then took that on board and refined/iterated the designs, and set out a strategy for the subscription model.
UI Design
We created a visual identity for the page around the ‘bring your past to life’ Findmypast mission
User Groups, Journeys and CTAs
We worked out the CTAs and core user journeys based on the business proposition and user groups. We started out with a concept to blur out the transcript thinking that users would clearly see that they needed to subscribe to unlock it. User testing proved this to be very confusing to users.
User testing the designs
The results of the user testing showed that users needed to be shown a completely different design, rather than a page that looked like the actual transcript. This was confusing users because they were able to see the transcript for free with a different subscription.
Iterating the design based on user feedback
We changed the design to make it much more obvious that the record needed to be bought and that you had to go through steps to buy and access it. The previous design did not make this clear.
More user testing
We conducted a further round of user testing before launch to ensure the flows worked and then created the final refined design based on the insight we had generated.
