Designing a discovery platform for end-of-life resources
Zero-to-one discovery platform & resource center for Reimagine End of Life
Reimagine End of Life 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.
Project Lead • UX Research • UI Design • Visual Design • Prototyping
Role
The organization needed a way to connect nearly 20,000 festival attendees to 500+ end-of-life providers throughout the year, so they approached my team about designing a resource center that could transition into a future marketplace.
Problem
Challenges
Solving this design challenge would require a clear focus on both empathy and accessibility.
How might we connect people with end-of-life providers throughout the year, beyond just the two annual festivals?
How might we design for the accessibility needs of senior citizens and others who seek more uplifting conversations around the (traditionally taboo) topic of death?
Scope
Zero-to-one design of a double-sided discovery platform that would connect people interested in the end-of-life space with professionals.
Our designs are a V1 that can be validated further at the San Francisco festival in October 2019 and can expand with more functionality and launch nationally during the New York City festival in April 2020.
The Reimagine Resource Community.
Helping people live fully, die better, and remember our loved ones.
The Design Process
Strategy
Reimagine wanted to bring its brand identity into a resource center and potential future marketplace for end-of-life providers.
Collateral given to attendees of the New York City festival.
We found that people nearing end-of-life don’t want death to be such a depressing, taboo topic.
User Interviews
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.
“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.”
We also learned 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.”
Scope
We needed to understand not only what we were building, but more importantly, what we were not building.
Initially, we were unsure whether this should be a marketplace or a resource center. Research made it clear that we needed to focus on providing valuable content to users, so we focused on designing a resource center for V1, 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 this until after launch because they were not critical screens
Critical Screens
Home page
Reimagine Pillars (Prepare/Remember/Live Fully) landing page
Navigation & search results page
Provider detail page
Structure
Defining the provider-generated content requirements would form the basis for 200+ landing pages upon launch.
Card sorting led us to key themes that we wanted to incorporate throughout the website.
Skeleton
Initial Prepare page sketch
Initial home page sketch
After showing users low-fidelity wireframes, they made it clear that we needed to center around a more positive and uplifting tone.
“Oh no! Don’t show the words ‘funerals & cremations’ first! We don’t want to see that right away.”
“Open up conversations for everybody, not just people nearing end-of-life.”
“My clients want to learn how they can live more fully, even though they may be going through a grieving process.”
We found that our original information architecture and hierarchy did not allow Reimagine’s brand attributes to shine and resulted in an unexpected major design challenge.
Instead of organizing the navigation based on end-of-life categories (funerals, cremations, hospice, etc.) we explored whether we could organize those categories under each of the main pillars (Prepare/Remember/Live Fully).
We needed to go from a bottom-up to a top-down information architecture.
We collaborated with Reimagine’s extended team to understand all the categories and sub-categories that would make up the website.
We structured the entire website around the three pillars, and users would now navigate based on sub-categories within these pillars.
Early header based on end-of-life categories
Updated header based on three key pillars
Surface
We based our UI on Reimagine’s original style guide of typography and color styles. However, we realized that we needed to add a second font to the style guide in order to break up the type hierarchy on the home page. We decided on a serif font, Enriqueta, which complemented the main Circular sans-serif font well.
We also decided to go with softer elements with rounded corners, even though the style guide for the festival website was based on sharp corners. The round corners added a sense of approachability to the site and also brought a sense of lightness.
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.
Selected UI Elements
Header
The home page header needed to convey awe and wonder in order to stay within Reimagine’s brand ethos. We chose a starry sky to evoke exploration and prominently featured the word “celebrate” in the copy.
Provider & Resource Cards
We decided to use a card format in the search results and navigation landing pages. We wanted to showcase the major sub-categories and give users a preview of the content they could expect upon clicking.
Resource Detail Cards
These cards live on the Provider page and link to an external website that houses the content. In V2, these will be replaced by resource landing pages that live natively within the resource center.