Death in Design: Dealing with Sensitive Topics

As a designer, you are more than likely to face some difficult ethical dilemmas during your career. In the last year alone we’ve had to deal with love, life, death, addiction, health, emergencies and a whole plethora of other sensitive topics across our UX & UI design projects. All users are different and can react to situations in completely different ways. The question is;

How do you conduct user research into these difficult areas? Harder still how do you test your product/service to evaluate its effectiveness in dealing with such issues?

Before we take a look at some of the processes I use to help handle these situations delicately but with precision, I want to share a couple of examples where sensitive topics have been handled really well, as well as where they’ve been handled really badly.

We will look at some examples in the greeting card industry, as this industry provides interesting case studies for a bunch of different sensitive topics that have directly affected members of our own team.

Moonpig is a greeting card company that provides cards for all your special occasions and unfortunate events, from birthdays & anniversaries to breakups & funerals.

In principle, this is an easy service from a user experience point of view; people buy the card that is right for them in the moment, Moonpig print it and send off for delivery.

However, from a retention point of view, a service like MoonPig needs to use the likes of email reminders to keep customers coming back. This part of the service provided one of our team members a particularly insensitive experience:

The importance of anticipation and considering the space between a system and a user’s journey is incredibly important. Had Moonpig extensively thought out their email reminder service this could have been prevented, as one of our team members found with Bloom and Wild. Bloom and Wild make sending arrangements of fresh flowers with bespoke presentation boxes an easy and intuitive online experience.

Often many issues don’t get caught before first releasing a product or service into the wild, which is why it is incredibly important that we keep track of any issues our users are having with our digital products and platforms.

However, there is a lot we can do upfront to do our best to avoid releasing a product that ensues any insensitive experiences. We’ve worked long and hard to get a process together that will respect this and keep our products continually informed by real end-users. Here are some of the best bits:

Always make sure you start by doing your research. Identifying your target market and getting to know them inside out is incredibly important. 

Observing them to understand their pain-points and how these pain-points affect them and those around them is incredibly important. This stage should be high volume and you should aim to speak to as many users as possible. User journeys are a hugely powerful tool for visualising this data in a way that’s useful during designing. 

Once you understand who your target users are and which issues they’re facing, you can begin to design a solution tailored to them, not just a top-level solution that hasn’t considered edge-cases and your audiences contextual scenarios.

In the context of sensitive subjects:

Sometimes this can be a difficult problem to approach. You have to choose whether to interview users or whether to observe them from afar.

For example, when researching an app that handles anonymous mortality rates users will likely be more than happy talking about their experiences in an interview. Whereas researching an app for those grieving the loss of a relative, would make talking to users directly far more difficult and sensitive, so we’d choose to approach it differently.

Throughout your design phase, you should never forget the research you’ve done up front and should continually reference back to this to ensure your solutions not only fit your users needs but fit within the ecosystem of other products they use.

A couple of ways that we do this as a team is to:

1. Make detailed wireframe and high fidelity user flows that detail exactly how the app will work, ensuring this will fit in with the user journey maps we identified during our research section.
2. Go through our designs, prototypes and builds and pass them against a set of ethical heuristics that help us avoid designing anything that is not in the users best interest.

Once our products have been released we have to keep on top of how they are performing and how our users are responding to them. One of the most effective ways to do this is using an analytics service such as Google Analytics 360. 

Analytics can give us granular levels of detail about our users and how they are using our products. Allowing us to track whether our initial target audience research is correct and how it may change over time.

We can also extract behaviour analysis of how our users behave in our app, tracking drop out/bounce rates and targeting the exact pages and even areas of pages that are causing pain-points. We can loop back and do some more user testing to understand why they’re experiencing these issues and how we can design solutions to fix them.

For this, we will focus on one particular case study where we were incredibly driven to overcome a delicate UX challenge: the loss of a pet. I also want to give a massive shoutout to James Seddon (UI Designer) and James Marriott (Creative Team Lead) for letting me draw upon their relative areas of expertise and experience.

Given that we had all had different experiences with losing a pet and dealing with death in UX. The first piece of research we did into this area was to read the pamphlets given out at veterinary practices around coping with the death of a pet.

Giving us a good steer on how the practices themselves handled the topic and an idea of the best linguistics and semantics that our app, experience and communications should be using.

All in all, there are a number of approaches, processes, actions and steps you can take to deal with death and other sensitive topics in design. By ensuring you have an established process around finding the best way to do so, you’ll ensure you’re always handling communications and providing an experience that benefits your end-users.

#1: Research your users and understand exactly what they want and how they want to get there.

#2: Look at the space between and consider where, when and how your users want to interact with your platform.

#3: Use performance analytics and data to inform decisions based on how existing users are interacting and behaving during their experience.

Drop us a message if you want to discuss dealing with death in design or have a similar issue that needs addressing. And make sure you check out the rest of my ethical design series!