Reimagine Community Resources
Reimagine is a non-profit that started as an Open IDEO Challenge. Through week-long festivals in San Francisco and New York City, the organization showcases the diversity and creativity of our community, considering death and celebrating life from every angle. However, without a marketplace for end-of-life resource providers, event attendees told us they found it challenging to discover products and services that align with Reimagine’s vision year-round.
Challenge
Design a greenfield resource center and marketplace in order to connect nearly 20,000 festival attendees to 500+ end-of-life providers throughout the year. Because of the emotional aspects of the topic we are tackling, understanding our audience is pivotal to our success.
Maintain brand identity while creating a central location for end-of-life resources.
Prioritize screens to launch an MVP by the October 2019 festival in San Francisco.
Design a scalable solution that would onboard San Francisco Bay Area providers to the marketplace by September 2019.
Project Goals
Outcome
Reimagine Community Resources was launched in September 2019 and can be visited here.
Meeting people where they are in life.
Discovery
Research Insights
Generative research involved user interviews, competitive and comparative analysis, personas, and user stories.
Who we’re designing for
We talked to five potential users in their 60s and 70s who have been to Reimagine events to learn more about the tone and language we needed to use in the resource center. We also talked to a professional grief counselor so we could incorporate their needs as a service provider.
“We need a platform that opens minds, gives information, and explores the topic of death with a sense of lightness. Why does dying have to be so depressing?”
“Life is going to be much more meaningful once death becomes your advisor.”
Pioneering the space
An initial challenge that we experienced while researching was that there are no major competitors in the space who have built something similar, using an offline/online hybrid model.
We learned that people who are nearing end-of-life don’t want death to be such a depressing, taboo topic, and that end-of-life providers need help marketing their offerings to a wider audience.
“People are finding my services because my podcast has a wide audience, but I need help reaching more people.”
Communicating the vision of Reimagine.
A tone of living more fully
To align with Reimagine’s brand identity, we needed a visual hierarchy that sparks curiosity, an information architecture that reflects Reimagine’s four pillars (wonder, preparation, remembrance, and living fully), and copy that communicates the importance of this shared human experience.
Branding
Designing form and function
We built off of Reimagine’s existing style guide that is currently used by its festival website. Incorporating variations in typography helped us create a clear visual hierarchy while designing new visual elements. We also introduced a new fourth accent color, because we wanted each of the four pillars to have their own accent color that would stay consistent throughout the website.
Style Guide
The importance of accessibility
Given many of our users are senior citizens, we were sure to follow Reimagine’s larger-than-normal font size guidelines and validated that all of our color contrasts received an AAA rating at WebAIM.org. We also used standard UI patterns because we needed to design for an audience that was not necessarily tech-savvy. It was also important to accentuate interaction-points within the design with color contrast and size.
Defining scope and deciding on an MVP.
Ideation & Insights
Blue sky
After several white-boarding sessions to sketch out content layouts and navigation, the team dot voted to decide which designs we would move forward with. We took inspiration from successful e-commerce sites like Etsy, The Knot, and Thumbtack. Importantly, this gave us insight into the breadth of this project.
Home page sketch
Results page sketch
Prioritization
Narrowing our scope
Because of our time constraint, it was important to isolate which screens would take precedence over others, and which would be the easiest to implement in the least amount of time.
User research made it clear that we needed to focus on providing valuable content to users, so we focused on designing a resource center for the MVP, with the ability to scale and grow into a marketplace later.
We had originally planned for a Blog and Discover (Pinterest-style) page, but we postponed development because they were not critical screens.
Critical screens
Home page
Navigation & search results page
Provider detail page
Resource detail page
The original “way in” to the experience did not resonate with our users.
Low Fidelity
Designing the home page
We initially took our design cues from Etsy and Thumbtack to create a typical marketplace experience. However, given the heavy and unknown nature of the topic of death, we shifted to a more content-driven “way in” to deeper parts of the experience.
ITERATION 2 - immersive content
ITERATION 1: traditional marketplace
The first iteration of the home page followed standard e-commerce patterns that were optimized for conversions. However, users told us that they didn’t think this was appropriate, given our challenging and emotional subject. Our navigation menu, which is the first thing users saw, showcased categories such as Funerals & Cremations. Users did not want to see “deathy” subjects as their introduction to the website. They wanted a more immersive and positive environment that would allow them ease themselves into the subject at their own level of comfortability.
We completely redesigned the home page so it would be an easier gateway into the experience, and to meet our users where they were with regard to their mental headspace. We designed the home page around the four Reimagine pillars so we could integrate the Reimagine narrative throughout the product. People who had an idea of what they were looking for could navigate dozens of categories via the primary navigation or via search. Others who were merely more curious about the subject of death and dying could experience interactive content as their way in.
Because we are looking for long-term connections with our users, the second iteration does not follow traditional marketplace design patterns that are optimized for getting users into and through the purchase funnel as quickly as possible.
Final screens
Home page
Primary navigation
Results page
Profile page
Onboarding 200+ Bay Area providers.
Populating content
Capturing Provider Content
We designed updated user flows to the existing content management system, which includes tagging and resource details required in order to populate the resource center.
Resource dashboard for providers
Key learnings
The importance of user research
Our original iteration of Reimagine Resources featured standard e-commerce patterns that devalued Reimagine’s brand identity and mission. Potential users made it clear that we needed to center around positive and uplifting tones, creating curiosity about the space without eliciting fear and thoughts of morbidity. This resulted in an unexpected — and welcome — design challenge.
Looking back
Looking ahead
The road ahead
Our beta version of the marketplace will be measured at the San Francisco festival in October 2019. After further iterations and added functionality, the product has scaled globally in tandem with our virtual worldwide festival, Reimagine: Life, Loss, & Love.