Storing Your Life’s Memories: A Web App for Those You Love
Wishplay is a company dedicated to granting wishes to terminally ill individuals. It’s difficult subject matter, as they often work with kids who wish for things like going to school or flying a kite outside. They typically grant wishes via VR, but when they came to our design team, it was for a new category of wishes: To leave behind memories for their loved ones.
David (Wishplay’s owner) needed a responsive app that could store and categorize memories, be viewed on numerous devices (including VR), and wouldn’t put off users by being too cliché or too morbid. They wanted users to be guided along the journey of how to record memories — what types of things should they talk about? What types of content should they record?
Starting from Ground Zero
The first challenge of the project was to determine what we were going to design (a website, a native app, or a web app). We chose a web app because it could easily be viewed on many devices, and we learned that our demographic (terminally ill individuals over 65) typically used tablets.
Next, we ran interviews and surveys to determine user pain points and goals for the app. We discovered a number of difficult challenges:
- Acknowledging that death is near is painful and sad.
- People don’t want to be remembered while they’re sick. They want to be remembered as healthy.
- They want the process to be as easy and smooth as possible.
Visual Design
I used the visual design to help combat one of the main paint points — that acknowledging death is painful. I aimed for a design that was pleasing and joyful, rather than competitors which had a calm, almost morose, aesthetic.
I chose bright, spirited colours that reflect the joyful aspects of life (playing with your kids, seeing family). I emphasized the idea of the life cycle — a butterfly that transforms from a caterpillar, or a chain symbolizing how we’re all linked to our past. But I also wanted to capture how facing death requires bravery (hence, the person on the bridge). No matter how much colour and approachability we brought to the app, each individual must do some emotional work on their own.
Design Solutions
The first pain point was that death is a difficult subject to acknowledge. In addition to making the app appear bright and friendly, we wanted to position this service as not just about leaving memories for when you’re gone, but also about journaling your life as a form of catharsis and self-reflection.
To do this, we created two places where users could leave content: their memories, which were directed to specific individuals, and their scrapbook, where they could leave content for everyone to see (lists of recipes, books and songs they loved, etc.). This also ensured people were remembered as they were when they were healthy, because scrapbook memories contained the items they loved most when they were well.
To make the process smooth, we designed a robust onboarding flow that walked users through each step of the app. They learned how the app worked, recorded a “practice” video, and added recipients (with the added option to skip any of these steps).
Learning from Experience
Designing a complex web app from the ground up was tough. There was a lot of content that needed to handled delicately, but still be clearly communicated. We also needed something that both a child and an elderly adult could easily use and understand.
We used all the data we collected to land on a bright, polished design that was straightforward and held the user’s hand through the process. The fact that we pulled it together in three weeks was an awesome feat!
