Sunset: Making the celebration of life easier (WINFO Hackathon 2022)
 

The Women in Informatics annual hackathon has the theme of “embracing the new” and encouraged participants to create a design solution that fits in with the theme. My team of four created a new app to ease the confusion and pain of handling the death of a loved one during COVID-19. During this project, my work focus was on product management, problem research, and user research.

Product Management

My main action as the product manager for this project was to create a project plan with clear objectives, motivations, and concepts to help guide our features, and designs. Below is an outline of my project plan and summary.

Purpose

The loved ones of people with a terminal illness who can’t be together in person.

• In these new times where getting together is harder than before, there is a real need to create connections with loved ones

• Many people in these situations experience anticipatory grief, the feeling of grief before death

Motivation

We want to help people in planning for the end-of-life of their loved ones with terminal illnesses in a meaningful way.

Problem Statement

How might we encourage lasting moments between people at the end of their life and loved ones who can’t physically be together in order to prepare both parties to embrace the future?

Purpose

Connecting with loved ones towards the time of passing as a vehicle to organize information and motivate actions towards the end of life.

• Making wills and obituaries feel less “final” and empty

• Embracing the new = embracing how life is going to be different

• Centered around the process of creating something together than it is about leaving something behind

• Imbuing logistical preparation with meaningful social interaction

Guiding Principles

Storytelling - establishing a legacy

• Answer prompts about their lives/ the memories they share with loved ones

• Leaving notes during the organization of information for different loved ones

Connection - collaborative activities to do with loved ones 

• Collaborative access to this app and its information

• Collaborative action items to do with users and loved ones 

• Information regarding their values when it comes to organizing their information after passing

Problem Research

After the initial brainstorming for this project, a lot of time was put into researching the problem we wanted to solve. This mostly involved desk research and personal experience as we only had 1 day to create this project. First I researched statistics about preparing for death in order to provide information on why this project is important and to better understand what is actually happening currently in regards to this topic.

From my findings, I found that….

1 out of 3 people involved with end-of-life care actually work with doctors or medical professionals to fully plan out the impact of a loved one’s passing
57% of adults 40+ discussed preferences about funeral arrangements with someone they trusted
44% of adults 40+ created legal documents such as a living will

With these statistics we better understood that most people do not get adequate information when it comes to planning a loved one’s passing, many adults do not have conversations with loved ones about their passing, and most adults have not actively prepared for passing. This provided us with a better understanding of what people are currently doing and how our project could help them.

Besides logistics, our app also aims to provide emotional support solutions to users. To understand what type of support our users would need we did more research and found…

(5 principles) of Palliative care

• Financial

• Spiritual

• Mental

• Emotional

• Social
  
  
  

From this research, we decided to include a social component to our app in order to provide a sense of mental, emotional and social palliative care as well as address the feelings of loneliness, the desire to talk, and anxiety.

User Research

After conducting problem research I began to conduct user research. I did desk research through scientific papers and personal blogs to understand the user’s cognition processes while preparing for a loved one’s passing. I additionally talked to acquaintances and their parents who have gone through the process of saying goodbye to a loved one.

EMPATHY MAPS

After this research, I created an empathy map which is a visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. The benefits of this exercise are that it externalizes knowledge about users to create a shared understanding of user needs and aid in decision making. This allowed all of our team members to align around a single framework in an organized way organize and to create goals that get to the heart of the logic and emotion of why users are willing to engage with a product.

PERSONA

From the empathy map I created, I then created a persona, and a user case to base our designs. This step in the user research process is important because it puts abstract concepts and perceptions into realistic scenarios.

Final Product

Features

Prepare

Complete important end-of-life task list

• Tip and information on writing a will, organizing funeral services, etc.

• Determine which online accounts are important to have usernames and passwords to

• Capture and organize collected moments

  • Photos, texts, notes

• Ability to export all the information stored on the app into a PDF/other doc types that they can share with other loved ones

Share

Personal connection and Storytelling

• Question bank

  • Users receive daily questions to find out more about the other

• Both parties can opt to be randomly served a picture (once they’re organized) and can write about what it makes them think about or feel for the other to see

• While organizing photos, users can attach notes/memories to each photo