Crafting an interface to help funeral directors sell pre-need
prelude
Pre-need (pre-planning funeral services) are gaining more and more momentum as families try to ease the burden of planning and financial planning from their grieving family members. While similar to at-need funeral planning, pre-need does have it’s own set of considerations and challenges like factoring in insurance for your plan or convincing your family members or spouse that pre-need is a legitimate service offered by a funeral home and not a scam.
Taking all of this information, we set out to create a web app that not only helped funeral directors walk clients through the process in a delicate way but also gave the clients confidence in what was being sold.
TL;DR
Project Type
Funeral Pre-Planning Web App
Deliverables
Web App
My Contribution
Concepting, UI/UX Design, Product Strategy, QA Testing
Sprint Week
After the vetting and discovery process that the Gitwit discovery + strategy team ran, it was time for an initial sprint to get a working v1 of what this product could look like. The full team spent 2 weeks going from sketching and whiteboarding to engineering a workable first version. My role in this sprint was a coaching and advisory role to the lead designer, Hailey, as well as active design support to help bring this to life. This part of the process is energizing as a designer because it’s the first point where we really get to control the direction of the product itself, by debating ideas and whiteboarding solutions with the right people in the room.
Final Direction
The design language of this app needed to feel modern but still in a way that didn’t feel totally alienated from the funeral industry. Over the course of this project, the team debated on whether or not this app could be used by consumers alone while also being used by a funeral director in an appointment. Because of this, we needed to keep the ui very simple and straightforward, making sure a consumer could understand what was happening without getting in the way of the funeral director or insurance agent.
The product has taken many turns since our initial sprint, but overall has stayed true to the core idea of aiding funeral directors and insurance agents in selling preneed. The app is now in funeral homes across Oklahoma and Texas, with the goal of moving into more states this year.
