Project Overview

I joined a team of 3 UI designers to work with Life in Motion Guide, a small company that helps people prepare for emergencies and other unforeseen circumstances via a binder workbook. The product is currently available as a hardcover binder and a printable PDF, and they are looking to expand the scope of the guide.

Karen Purze, founder of Life In Motion Guide, came into our kick-off meeting with an infectious enthusiasm for the end-of-life planning process and how grossly neglected it was. In the first meeting, we established on the two main problems in the end-of-life planning industry, and solutions to heal these afflictions.

Through increasing interactivity & approachability, there was an opportunity to disrupt the outdated end-of-life planning industry and it was our team's mission to create a product that fully maximizes the efficacy of the above remedies. Despite being 40 years younger to her target demographic, Karen made me seriously consider evaluate my end-of-life and estate management and the disastrous consequences that would follow from being unprepared. Her enthusiasm was astonishingly convincing, and I wanted to embed every ounce of it into my final design. End-of-life planning is uncomfortable but vital to preventing a lifetime of heartache down the line. It was my responsibility to make it approachable. The success of our designs hinge on the following success metrics.

Research

The State of End-of-life Planning

80 Million American families have not discussed end-of-life plans, and 70% of end-of-life conversations are prompted by a health crisis or emergency event.

Life In Motion Guide Users

The vast majority of Karen's customers are:

1. Age 45+
2. Mothers
3. Thrust onto end-of-life planning by a family emergency

Karen provided us with user research material and from that, we created a proto-persona. Jennifer, our fictional persona, is a 60-year-old mother anticipating the death of her father. Her parents, uncomfortable with discussing or even acknowledging the subject of death, neglected their estate planning and emergency preparedness documents, leaving Jennifer to sort everything back in order. Overwhelmed, she needs an approachable tool to deal with parent's predicament, and more importantly, to prevent her children from going through the same thing.

Designing For The Elderly

Best Design Practices

• Avoid making assumptions in regards to UI interactivity, navigation patterns
• Avoid font sizes smaller than 16 pixels
• High contrast ratios with text.
• Give clear feedback on progress and completion
• Simple plain backgrounds are better to avoid distraction
  

With the domain and user research thorough digested, we summarized the purpose of our designs into one aspiration goal.

Competitive Landscape

We analyzed 6 players in the end-of-life planning space. We found that competitors generally utilized blue in their color palettes, with varying degrees of saturation. Blue is associated with professionalism and competency and our competitors were able to execute this with varying degrees of success. Out of the 6, 4 examples yielded the best insights. I summarize those points in the slider below.

With these best—and worst—design practices thoroughly examined, we created our design principles; foundational standards that every following design decision would strive to meet.

Exploring & Testing Styles

Led by our Design Principles, we went on to create and test style tiles—early depictions of the visual rebrand Life In Motion Guide could undergo. All interviewees were over 50 and familiar with the end-of-life process. Each designer created 3 style tiles totaling in 9, and we recorded a variety of qualitative and quantitative metrics to derive the most effective elements of each style-tile. In the slider below, I show my 3 style tiles along with a major insight from this round of desirability testing.

User Testing

With the style direction established, it was time to apply it to our prototype. Karen and our team agreed to design our next prototype for one task flow; signing up. We structured our interview plan to answer desirability, usability, and conceptual questions. Our team a vague 'Interactive Guide' image section to allow users to share what features users would want and expect to see in an end-of-life web app.

We used wireframes provided by Karen to produce high fidelity prototypes. With each iteration, we made improvements through team critique sessions and validated them via user testing. We shared Karen's desire to stay as faithful to her proposed content and brand as possible so as a result, she was very receptive to our suggestions.

Prototype v1.0: User Flow

Prototype v1.0: Testing Results

Desirability

The visuals were often described as crisp & modern. Bright red CTAs were hard to miss and made users want to take action. However, outlined iconography choice while appropriate and effective, did little to comfort the user.

Usability

100% of users were able to navigate and complete the flow without instruction. Some buttons were unclear in their intended purpose due to vague copywriting.

Conceptual

When we asked users what they wanted and expected from the interactive guide, the three most requested features were to:

1. Securely store sensitive information for emergencies.
2. Easily print for physical documentation.
3. Ability to easily share with family members.
   

Facing Constraints

Upon reporting to Karen our interview data and user expectations for the web app, she revealed Life In Motion's inability to create a secure online storage solution at this juncture. Securely storing data was far too expensive and was subject to heavy regulation. An entirely new challenge emerged, and with that, a new objective.

We wanted to create a product that not only met our interviewees' explicit demands but also solved pain points that were alluded to indirectly. Our team came up with the Interactive Family Checklist, a curated emergency online checklist that was customizable and tailored for family completion. This web app would contain 4 primary features.

Due to the web application's inability to document sensitive information, it would be supplementary to the existing physical guide. Through its simple yet robust feature, the Interactive Family Checklist now served as the principal method of getting families to begin and complete the end-of-life planning process and adds an exciting new product to the Life in Motion Guide product suite.

Final Product

In total, our team tested two iterations of prototypes. With changes made from the previous round of prototype tests, our goal for the second round was singular: to assess the value proposition of the Interactive Family Checklist and how likely users were to use it.

Parting Thoughts

Working with Karen was an incredible learning experience and I'm grateful for having the privilege to work on such an important problem with such a great client. Impromptu roadblocks like interview difficulties, client misalignments, and scope expansion forced me to constantly revaluate and prioritize my workflow. I was challenged to extract optimal solutions from conflicting user interview data and think creatively to work around constraints. Despite these difficulties, the joy I felt from seeing Karen and the interviewees light-up to my designs made these struggles insignificant. This project provided me the opportunity to exercise my UI, UX, marketing, copywriting, and content strategy skills, and I loved every step of it.