🏆 CORE77 Design Awardee
Recognized by the Core77 Design Awards as a Student Winner in Consumer Technology.
CASE STUDY | Carnegie Mellon University
LifeKit - A mobile app concept that helps individuals celebrate life’s moments and prepare for the future.
Team
Anna Boyle, Michelle Chou, Eustina Daniluk, Nandini Nair
Role
Ideation, Design Research, Visual Design, Concept Development, UI/UX Prototyping
Tools
Figma, After Effects, Adobe Illustrator, Pen and Paper
Time
2020 | 15 Weeks | Carnegie Mellon University
OVERVIEW
Our challenge was to develop a design concept that focused on improving life.
We were tasked with developing a design concept in partnership with The Index Project, a non-profit organization that promotes designs that improve lives worldwide.
WHY DESIGN FOR END OF LIFE?
Despite the diversity of life — one universal fact of existence is that it ends.
Our team found that only 1 in 3 adults in the U.S. have made plans for their end-of-life proceedings or have spoken to a loved one about their wishes. Our challenge was to re-imagine the concept of planning for the end of life to improve the quality of one’s life over time.
OUTCOME
LifeKit - breaks down daunting life planning tasks into bite-sized steps and allows users to update, authorize, and legalize their wishes at their own pace.
Integrated within the OS ecosystem and government, legal, health, and financial sectors. LifeKit makes planning a part of living, enabling better peace of mind for individuals and their loved ones.
🌈 LifeKit Feature Set
1.0
Celebrate life’s moments.
Prepare for the future.
Celebrating the past and present to envision the future.
2.0
Make future plans, step
by step.
Breaking down daunting tasks throughout the process.
3.0
Update, authorize, and legalize wishes, at your own pace.
Empowering autonomy and enabling connections to the online notarization processes.
3.0
Make life-saving information accessible to first responders.
Enabling medical professionals to access critical information in emergencies.
1.0. | PROCESS
Preliminary Research
We researched how people regard mortality today and found that many neglect to prepare for uncertainty and postpone planning indefinitely.
We defined our mission for the project to motivate and mobilize people to prepare for the unexpected.
OBSERVATIONS & INTERVIEWS
We conducted expert interviews, stakeholder interviews, conversational workshops, and a graffiti wall activity.
9 | EXPERT INTERVIEWS
We spoke to 9 experts in the fields of hospice care, legal planning, social work, and others to develop a clear and broad understanding of the territory we were going to be researching
15 | STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS
We interviewed 15 individuals, aging from 26 to 87. Through this process we developed an understanding of current trends in aging populations and observed what a best-possible aging future could look like.
3 | CONVERSATIONAL WORKSHOPS
We held 3 workshops with Hello, a conversational game that asks users what matters most to them in their life. This workshop gave us the opportunity to compare multi-generational perspectives and social settings.
+100 | GRAFFITI WALL RESPONSES
We posted 4 graffiti wall activities that received +100 participants. This activity helped us identify how individuals perceive their lifespan as well as gauging the gap in expectations of retirement and end of life.
EXPLORATORY RESEARCH INSIGHTS
In synthesizing our initial findings we came away with these three key insights that helped us define our problem statement.
Often Triggered by Life Events
Lack of Awareness
Life planning is oftentimes only brought into focus when an individual survives or sees a loved one survive a life-threatening event, or when feeling "old enough" to do so.
Not Formalized or Communicated
People have ideas about what they want, but most do not formalize them or communicate their intentions to those who matter.
Many are not aware of how to prepare for the long term, also not ready to navigate the complexity of legal, medical, and government systems.
3.0 | PROCESS
Generative Research
How might we motivate and mobilize individuals to prepare for the unexpected?
We dug deeper into why people do not plan and what actions they need to take to make planning easier.
GENERATIVE RESEARCH METHODS
We translated our ‘How Might We’ statement into 3 questions — What does it take to be prepared? Why don't people plan? What do people need?
We used 3 research methods to answer these questions.
Secondary Research
To help individuals get prepared, we needed to understand what it means to be prepared first. We reviewed many legal, medical, and planning resources.
Experience Audit
We tried out a few different resources from our secondary research.
This helped us grasp what it takes to be prepared and the dependencies involved. Since everyone's life is unique, it entails different planning needs
Generative Workshop
We designed a participatory workshop for in-depth discoveries about what matters most to individuals, what a preferred end-of-life future looks like, what motivates planning and the barriers, and what could help shift mindsets and behaviors.
GENERATIVE RESEARCH INSIGHTS | KEY PAIN POINTS
The barriers to planning
The drawbacks of current planning methods
Lack of awareness, knowledge, motivation, and commitment to act.
Lack of access to resources to help navigate complex systems.
The complexity of planning
People have ideas about what they want, but most do not formalize them or communicate their intentions to those who matter.
Information can be scattered all over the place, and physical documents can be outdated or misplaced.
3.0 | PROCESS
Ideation + Evaluation
We dug deeper into why people do not plan and what actions they need to take to make planning easier.
Through the ideation process, we narrowed down our design concept to an app in the mobile OS ecosystem that makes planning part of living.
Storyboarding for Speed Dating
We came up with diverse concepts and consolidated them into 4 directions. We then created storyboards to showcase how users could interact with the design. We got to speed-date these concepts with 10 people online.
Competitive Analysis
We analyzed 6 products/services in a similar space of legal + life planning. This reassured our niche product positioning. We also drew insights for the UX, UI, and tone of voice. We learned from what others did well and what warranted improvement.
We also spoke with one of the CEOs (Mr. Kamps of LifeFolder) and learned about the practical challenges for a start-up team to bring a product like this to life.
Wireframing + Prototyping
for User Testing
As we refined our concepts, we asked ourselves: Should our design exist on an existing platform or within an existing system? How could our design make the most impact?
After testing our concepts with 8 people online with wireframes and prototypes, our concept of a design solution existing within a mobile operating system won over social media, productivity tools, and others.
IDEATION + EVALUATION INSIGHTS
1
People prefer participating in life planning individually v.s. in a group.
2
People prefer platforms or systems that they have engaged with in the past.
3
Prompting at the time of life transition events can often reach individuals who don’t typically plan for the future.
4
People seek external facilitation that nudges them and keeps them engaged with planning over time.
5
The tone of voice should be non-threatening and balance both friendliness and professionalism.
6
The writing level should be at a grade school level for accessibility.
4.0 | PROCESS
Design Development
After conducting our research, we consolidated everything that we learned and developed these four human-centered design principles to guide how we approached the design and prototype.
REFLECTION
LifeKit emerged from a studio project at Carnegie Mellon School of Design.
In this project, we explored design to improve life, pre-covid. We found that despite the diversity of life — one universal fact of existence is that it ends.
We wanted to explore how looking at the end of life can open up opportunities to live more mindfully and sustainably in the present and contribute to an improved future beyond life.
“In theory, design could – and should – have a useful part to play in improving the quality of any aspect of daily life that is no longer fit for purpose, and death is no exception.”
— Alice Rawsthorn, Design Critic
Two months into this project, the world met an unprecedented time. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only changed the settings of our daily lives, it has also increased our mental models of community, wellness, and the end of life. Searches for legal documentation such as online wills have skyrocketed, but unless we shift our mindset to understand the importance of future thinking, it is unlikely this interest will result in better-prepared and resilient communities.
We designed LifeKit to bridge this divide by incorporating emergency medical information and legal documentation designed to enable peace of mind during times of crisis. The app then carries this momentum further, incorporating acts of planning into celebrations of life's important moments.
LifeKit is a work in progress for building an integrated digital infrastructure for our society. Our hope is that our invention could help individuals be prepared for their future in addition to developing resilient communities over time.
