For this particular project I had the opportunity to work with The Cremation Care Centre, a new Toronto company that is in the beginning stages of simplifying the process of funeral planning for online clients.
Tools: Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator, Figma, Maze
The goal of this design is to create a user-friendly website for clients to easily plan and organize their cremation arrangements based upon where they live or another preferred location.
Research Phase
Research - Online Forums
Searching through online forums that specifically deal with the topic of funeral planning I discovered a general consensus amongst redditers that seemed to focus heavily on users that want to have a 'local feel' when planning for either themselves or for another loved one. Appropriately, users are hesitant to continue the process of preplanning when they get the impression that this sort of 'personal' planning' can be expensive and clients ultimately turn away from this - unable to see the full scope of the range of services and products that are available for them.
User Pain Points
Needs to feel local / personalized
Overwhelmed by high pricing
Lack of information about the process
Unable to see or understand the range of options
Competitive Analysis
This leads us to search through competitors to see what they already have that can help, but also see what functions we can add to make the process easier - especially when clients are usually dealing with this during an emotional period.
The general census between competitors is that most offer the essential and basic functions on their websites such as preplanning information - whether online or over the phone, a funeral planning checklist, vendor price comparisons among their other services and products.
Ideation Phase
User Personas
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The goal of this process is to help emphasize with this user and understand their needs. From my research it is evident (and not surprising) that a vast majority of clients that are looking for information and planning options are senior citizens while other types of clients are those seniors children whom are looking after their parents wishes in the case that they are unable to do so themselves.
In any case, these types of users are notoriously known for not being able to be tech efficient especially on mobile platforms. Thus, it is no surprise why this application needs to simple, straightforward, and easy to follow for anyone regardless of their tech skills.
Site Mapping
Simple layout of an application that allows you to build the journey of how to plan the cremation process.
Key components for planning include:
Cremation
Visitation
Service
Reception
Burial
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As the ideation process continues to expand I started to build a more personable approach that allows the users to customize how they want their 'celebration of life' to look like while still being informative and easy to use.
Implementation Phase
Wireframes
Wireframing process to establish structure and flow of possible design solutions to ideate toward optimal, user focused prototypes.
This leads us to search through competitors to see what they already have that can help but also see what functions we can add to make the process easier - especially when clients are usually dealing with this while still grieving.
The general consensus between competitors is that most offer the essential and basic functions on their websites such as preplanning information - whether online or over the phone, a funeral planning checklist, vendor price comparisons among their other services and products.
Key takeaway from my meetings with local funeral directors:
Pages are too information / may be overwhelming for the user
More personalization
Customization
Branding (cohesiveness between website and application
Adjustments Phase
Branding
User Testing
Building a Prototype
After building the prototype, I tested the usability of the application through Maze.
Feature Added: Call to Action button with contact information (email, phone number, address)
60%
60% of users are still more comfortable going through this process over the phone, 30% were okay with pre-planning on a website. This is why it is essential for the application to have a call to action button where users could contact the business directly so that users can feel comfortable talking over the phone with a funeral director if needed.
Feature Added: Greg, virtual funeral director to appease directional challenges, answer faq questions and to act similar to ‘chat help’
90%
90% indirect success rate of users who completed the mission via unexpected paths, however, 10% of users gave up on the mission completely. To fix this issue, and to allow users to put at ease by the amount of information, I introduced a feature named Greg that would serve as a 'help' feature - a virtual funeral director avatar.
Reflection Phase
The next step would be to continue iterations and creating a new prototype to test on a new set of users, based on those results we will see if the product is ready to move to the next step or other revisions need to be made.
UX/UI Designer, Graphic Designer, Frequent Photographer and Mountain Climber
daynahogle@gmail.com
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