Final Destination: Creating a better afterlife for our digital treasures.

F I N A L D E S T I N AT I O NI X D A 2 0 1 7 - N Y C

Creating a better afterlife for our digital treasures.@ M L S S A M R T N # D E S I G N F O R D E A T H

@ M L S S A M R T N # D E S I G N F O R D E AT H

As a design lead at Collective Health, I spend my days thinking about how to keep people healthy by enabling them to get the care they need.


However, today, I’d us to talk about the opposite of that, - which is death.


More specifically, death within the context of product design - especially those in which people create, collect and share personal content and media.

Now, unless you’re a regular viewer of this program, most of us probably have a difficult time incorporating considerations of death into our everyday life, let alone product design strategies. There are a couple reasons for this…

• you are here

death is hereFirst… We tend to perceive death as something far in the future - way in the future.

It’s kind of like United States deficit. You know it exists, and that it may impact you in some indirect way, but it doesn’t necessarily influence your everyday decisions.

“Dude, I died this past weekend and it was UH-MAZING. Totes recommend.”


– N O O N E S A I D E V E R

It’s also unknowable. No one has died and come back to tell the tale - at least that we know of. This leaves each of us with only a 2nd hand experience of death leading us to think about it in somewhat abstract, indirect terms - that is - it’s something that happens to somebody else. This ‘unknowable-ness’ further complicates our ability to consider needs surrounding death into daily decision-making.

And death is also just kind of a bummer.

It’s something we’re programmed, by nature, to avoid. Compounding this, at least in the West, we generally carry - even if unconsciously - an uncomfortable, fearful relationship with death.

Regardless of these challenges, ignoring death as a context in which your product needs to perform can have very real, implications for your brand that spreads across significant portions of your user community.

Individualistic Perspective

Inactive

Customer Relationship Begins

Death

Active

There is a temptation to think of death as a one-time event transforming an active customer to an ‘inactive’ one - A.K.A ceasing to spend money, or generating data. So, investing in cases of death may not seem like a valuable use of your time and resources.

Relational Perspective

Customer Relationship Begins

Death

Active Father

Mother

Spouse

Children

AuntsCousins

Uncles

Close Friends

However, if we flip this perspective around and view it, not from the angle of the individual who dies, but from the perspective of those who are experiencing the death of that individual - it begins to look a bit different.

From this view, the ask becomes not about servicing the deceased - although that is important - It becomes about servicing the living.

Now, assuming your customers are humans… Death is a universal factor of life.

This means people will need to use your product at some point, if not multiple times to navigate the emotions - even the logistics - of a death. Especially if your product has social dimensions to it and engagement tends to stretch over long periods of time.


I personally have experienced 3 deaths in the past for 4 years - most recently the sudden death of my brother-in-law Eli this past autumn. And in my own research, I've witnessed people navigate death on various social media services, on average once per year.

But these are not just singular moments either. They are a collection of many moments which stretch on for months, sometimes years - instigated through activity on memorialized profiles or through content associated with the deceased popping up in search results or recommendations.

At scale, death is inevitable

Shares

Responds

ReceivesDeath

of another

(Life Event)

Sustained UsageEvolves Usage

And at scale, this means death as a context is an almost unavoidable event.

So if we truly consider ourselves human-centric in our approach, we should integrate accommodations for this most universal of human experiences into our product’s design and architecture from the beginning - inside and out.

?


Hopefully you’re thinking, “Yeah! We should totally be thinking about this.” But…. “Where do we begin?”

Luckily there are many people already doing a lot of research in this space.

D E S I G N P R I N C I P L E S F O R D E AT H


In my own efforts over the past 3 years - which has included ongoing interviews with people who are experiencing death and mourning in digital spaces, along with tracking academic research and developments in the industry, I’ve identified a few emerging “Design Principles for Death” that I’d like to share with you.

“Being notified through social media that someone you cared for has passed away still feels unnatural. … It is disconcerting to learn about the death of a loved one between a cat video and a political rant.”– ‘ A N G E L A’ , I N T E RV I E W # 7

E M B R A C E T H E T O U G H M O M E N T S

R E F : “ L E G A C Y C O N TA C T: P O S T- M O R T E M S T E W A R D S H I P A T FA C E B O O K ” , J . B R U B A K E R , V. C A L L I S O N - B U R C H , P G 4 , 2 0 1 5

First, don’t be afraid to embrace this tough topic. While no business wants to be a downer by bringing up death - the benefits of engaging this outweigh the drawbacks. Educating customers about what you offer to support this very sensitive time is - not only the right thing to do - It’s also smart business. Companies such as Facebook and Google have already instituted stewardship-type features into their products. They realize that ignoring these sensitive moments leads to very real, and painful, experiences - translating to negative consequences for their product and ultimately their brand.

M E F O R M E V S . M E F O R Y O U

“I would want everything removed. The content I created will no longer be mine, and I don't want it to be a constant presence frozen in time…”

“Not being allowed access to my brother’s account after he died. Not at all the level I expected.”

– ‘ K I M ’ , I N T E RV I E W # 8 – ‘ F R A N K ’ , I N T E RV I E W # 5


Next, be aware of the conflicting needs that exist in this space. On one hand, there is the desire to preserve our profiles as we had created them. On the other hand, there are needs of a grieving community - which often entail a desire to receive access or handover of the deceased’s content for the purposes of archiving, inheritance and in some cases, removal from public view. There is a delicate balance that should be found here. Because needs of a grieving community are as important as the intentions of those who died. Neither should be sacrificed for the other.

W E D E C I D E F O R T O D AY, N O T T O M O R R O W

“It's hard to anticipate what the situation would be when I die.”– ‘ F R A N K ’ , I N T E RV I E W # 5

@ M L S S A M R T N # D E S I G N F O R D E A T H

Part of this tension is due to how we make decisions about what to share and our desired privacy levels of that content. These decisions are typically driven by needs within the context of the living moment… not necessarily the future.

And for most of us, anticipating the needs of others in the event of our death is often a difficult and ambiguous task. This makes it incredibly important to not make the choices that were made in life, be the status quo solution for death.

G E N E R O U S & G R A C I O U S E X I T S

“Give them more control of what happens to their stuff after they go. Give them true 'ownership' of the media. Which is what most people think they have...”

– ‘ J O S H ’ , I N T E RV I E W # 9

@ M L S S A M R T N # D E S I G N F O R D E A T H

And finally… Do not penalize families for wanting to remove the deceased’s profile from your platform. Surprisingly, options for taking content with you are limited to non-existent. 3rd party services have cropped up to fill this gap - but it is not ideal. The last thing most people want to be dealing with during a time of death is to be researching workarounds for your product’s inability to meet their needs.

People have honored your business with a wealth of content and information about their lives, helping make your business successful. Honor them back and make it easy to leave without sacrificing what they gave you.

As mentioned before, Facebook and Google provide good examples of putting these principles into practice. Facebook’s Legacy Contact which launched in 2015 was a collaboration with Jed Brubaker - an information scientist at the University of Colorado.

It enables me to designate a steward for my profile after my death. providing carefully selected features for downloading previously shared content and managing profile connections - but blocks access to content I previously marked as private.

In a similar vein, Google’s Inactive Account Manager enables me to designate an heir for my data. But it wouldn’t allow them to send messages from my account. Because let’s be honest - that’s kind of creepy.

Both are steps in the right direction, and clearly illustrate how serving death can be made part of a product’s core feature set.

However, there is still much more that can be done for this underserved aspect of human experience.

“It (facebook profile) equates to what was once a trunk in the attic. They are memories that I've created and collected.”


– ‘ T O M ’ , I N T E RV I E W # 2

When we encourage people to create, store and share content on our platforms, we become - by defacto - carriers of precious cargo.

“When my friend died, his facebook page became a place where friends and family could post messages of love and support… and grieve together. I found this to be a beautiful and valuable thing.”– ‘ K E V I N ’ , I N T E RV I E W # 1 6


While this content may be considered by us - ‘business capital’ we cannot forget that it is also, in part, a record of a human’s life… and plays important roles for families, communities and to some extent - our collective historical narrative.

– A B B Y S M I T H R U M S E Y, “ W H E N W E A R E N O M O R E ”

“Memory is not about the past, it is about the future.”

Because passing on memories is not about the past. It is about the future. Seeing where we’ve been - enables us to better see where we want to go.

So we - as carriers of this precious cargo - have a moral and social responsibility, to ensure that the personal archives of others - and ourselves - are able to be accessed, preserved and passed on to those who treasure them most.

T H A N K Y O UI X D A 2 0 1 7

Create a better afterlife for our digital treasures.


Final Destination: Creating a better afterlife for our digital treasures.

Design

Transcript of Final Destination: Creating a better afterlife for our digital treasures.