In understanding human behavior we must take three things into account. Motivation, ability, and triggers. When motivation is high, we can get people to do really difficult things. However, ability and motivation are directly related and have a tradeoff. In order to perform a behavior a person must have the ability to do so. This seems obvious, but often times we, as humans, tend to assume people have more ability than they really do. The triggers are what allow a targeted behavior to actually happen. An effective trigger for a small behavior can lead people to perform harder behaviors.

Let's face it, family history is often times very difficult. Even if technology has helped in large ways in making it much easier, the perception of most people is that it is difficult. When we take a good look at the target audience for FamilySearch right now, there is a very low amount of motivation as well as a very low amount of perceived ability. 

There's two paths to increase ability. We can teach people how to perform the behavior, or we can make the behavior easier to do. One method to help simplify or make the behavior easier is through what is called, "elegant persuasion." We can trigger someone to do small and simple behaviors that will naturally lead people to the intended behavior without making them feel persuaded or compelled.

Through an activity feed we could potentially provide triggers to small and simple behaviors that will naturally lead people to the intended behavior.

Through finding easy ways to thank people for what they are doing with family history they will feel more appreciated, which can motivate them to want to do more. In this example, the idea is that when a person helps index, digitized historical records, we can thank them after the batch of historical records becomes available to be searched on FamilySearch.org. This helps teach people why we need their help indexing historical records, and helps them feel appreciated for the work they are doing to help other people find these historical records about their ancestors.

We also are providing triggers, which are small and easy ways to continue doing things like helping index more records or search the records that they just helped index.

This provides a trigger to easily allow people to learn more about their ancestors and how they are related. We then trust that the natural result of learning more about one ancestor, will help them become more motivated and have a stronger desire to want to learn more about all of their ancestors.

We can find ways to congratulate people for the work that they are doing. In this example, after they do temple work for someone in an LDS Temple, we can thank them by congratulating them. In the background we can show a picture of which LDS Temple the work was done in. We also provide triggers to make it easy to learn more about that person and how they are related. We then trust that this will help motivate them to want to learn more about other ancestors and find more ancestors to do work in the temple.

Currently FamilySearch is not doing much to encourage people to document and tell their own story. The more stories and information that they can get from people, while they are living, will help the future generations of our great grandchildren and on. This would help greatly simplify the future work involved in researching and discovering the stories of our ancestors.

Here is a design I came up with that would make it more inviting for people to want to begin sharing their own stories within FamilySearch and their future generations.

One way to help make it easier for people to document and share their stories is through opening it up to third party products and applications like Day One. This allows people to easily push the content that they've already documented into FamilySearch. We could also open it up to Facebook and Instagram or even blogging platforms like Tumblr.