Pruduct & UX Design
at National Geographic
Shaping the customer experience for the Genographic Project.
IN 2011 I began working with National Geographic to lead the experience design for the Genographic Project, an initiative run by the scientist and author, Spencer Wells. I led design and development for all aspects of the product and helped form new organizational strategies to sustain a design-driven approach for future work.
The Genographic Project was the first consumer genetic testing kit on the market. Customers buy a kit that allows them to send in a DNA sample for sequencing at our partner labs. A few weeks later, they get access to a rich, interactive digital storytelling experience about their personal ancient ancestry.
The project was also an unprecedented initiative in citizen-science. When customers sent in their samples their DNA helped expand the Genographic Project database and deepen the stories for everybody, making every customer a contributor to the research effort that formed the foundation of the product.
IN the beginning, my role was to lead the design for digital storytelling—to shape the experience for the individualized storytelling and other aspects of the product. This involved significant user research, prototyping, and user interface design. I also led the front- and back-end development for this phase. The final product was a major success, offering customers a rich individualized storytelling experience, making the science behind the project accessible, and connecting them to the other Project participants.
The success of this first phase gave us the institutional buy-in to adopt a design-driven approach for future work across the entire project. My role expanded to help establish organizational strategy and processes, and to incubate the team culture necessary to bring these changes to life. I educated managers and team members in intensive philosophy sessions and hands-on workshops. Together we prototyped methods and architected formal processes and protocols. We secured office spaces and turned them into studio spaces. We developed core principles, maintained a reading list, attended events and meet-ups, and more.
Today, the Genographic team continues using the approach we developed, and their success has empowered them to spread it to other National Geographic projects.
