Several months ago, I got so fed up with Ancestry.com’s hint system that I did this. Yup, I disabled all hints on all of my trees.
No more little wiggly leafs showing up on profiles distracting me with icons of little angels or records dated decades before my ancestor was born, or after they died.
Did you see that? In the upper left corner? No?
How about now. See those little leafs pop up?
Yeah. So the only thing that ancestry.com’s “hint disabling” feature does is prevent the little leaf from appearing in the top right-hand corner here.
And in those intervening months, Ancestry.com served me up over a thousand of what I have to imagine are useless hints.
Now, I’ll be honest, I’m the one who is incapable of ignoring all of those hints. I know intellectually that maybe only one or two of those will tell me something new, and so I shouldn’t bother to look. I know that I’m the one that can’t control myself. I admit that.
But I also know that ancestry.com has a data analytics team, and I bet you that analytics team has shown that hints drive user engagement, and that continued user engagement is highly correlated with, and possibly causal of, subscription renewals. So ancestry.com knows that if it keeps showing me hints, I’ll have a reason to keep coming back and paying them money without them having to improve their service much.
I do data analytics for a living for a big tech company. This is the kind of thing we get paid to do.
So… I’m going to start looking at ancestry.com competitors. See what else is out there, see if I can find a service that doesn’t distract me, that helps me focus on the genealogy research I want to focus on.
Not that I’ll be able to drop ancestry.com: the service is designed to be sticky, to make it difficult to switch to a competitor because you can’t move your data easily.
It’s a design model that’s falling out of favor in the commercial space because companies hate getting locked-in. But there’s little to stop it in the consumer space.