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Role
Client
Tools
Duration
Product Designer
Personal Proejct
Pen & Paper
Figma
Principle
Lumion
2022.3 - ongoing
- Overview -
"Hug important people in your life one more time"
Farewell empowers people to pre-plan their own memorial sessions and say goodbye to family and friends in VR. It breaks the constraints of time, location and unexpected situations such as pandemic. At the same time, Farewell rethinks the meaning of life, memory, and the way people leave this world.
VR Concept Prototype
Please turn on the volume!
- Understand the Challenge -
At the beginning of COVID, around the end of 2020, I was interning remotely with a company called the Spill Teem. Very sadly, both of my supervisor's grandpa and grandma passed away because of COVID and cancer. However, due to the social distance during the pandemic, my supervisor was unable to give them a memorial session to celebrate their life. Finally, the memorial session happened on zoom. But my supervisor believed they definitely deserve more than a zoom session and deserve a great celebration of their life... Then, the inspiration comes to my mind:
How Might We
design a memorial session for people who passed away during COVID?
- Research -
To get a more comprehensive understanding of how memorial sessions happen during an unusual period and what people really care about during memorial sessions, I utilized the method of desk research, non-directed personal interview, persona, and journey to analyze the behavior of the audience.
Desk Research
By collecting online information and interviews, I found that Zoom is the main choice chosen by people who are unable to host in-person memorial sessions/funerals for their family members who pass away, which all the people join the same video call, and the main screen will share the scene of the memorial procedure. There are also some online platforms from such as Tribucast, which has a better design and function than zoom, where people can click to see photos and information of the person who passed away.
However, many people feel that online platforms lose the intimate personal connection. As one quote excerpted from the interview says:
"In the past, all my parents’ friends would be talking to us and distracting us and remembering good times and there would be a whole lunch platter of Jewish deli-food, like whitefish and lox and the bagels. We would be comforted by the people around us. However, What we face now is just the cold screen. ”
Non-directed personal interviews
At the main time, I took advantage of personal interviews to dive into potential customers. I chose non-directed interview as the strategy because of the sensitivity of the topic, which is not very suitable to deliver questionnaires in a public way. I interviewed 23 different people in my connections whom attended memorial session/funeral for at least once.
"It is really heart-broken for me to lose both my grandpa and grandma during the pandemic. I really want to hug them one more time but I could not.”
At the end of first - roud the interviews, I got clear ideas about what people (both the family members who are the hosts and people who are invited) care about during the memorial session. Then, I developed personas and journey maps through these two categories of people, trying to find their pain points that need to be solved.
Persona & Journey Map
Both persona and journey map depicts the story of Richard who loses his family member and Ingrid who was invited to attend the memorial session. I described the observed user experience and highlighted the pain points.
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- Findings -
Key Insights
After reviewing what I got from research, persona, and journey map, I concluded three key insights.
A Lack of Human Connection
Inflexible Location & Time
Complex Procedure
How Might We
design a memorial session with more human interactions and flexibility (time and location)?
Brainstorm
The first iteration, which was my solution last year, was a VR memorial session planned out by family members for people who passed away. However, after several user testing sessions and the dicussion of the topic with my friends, a new direction of design was proposed. I had a hard time making up my mind to go for the bold new ideas, but the feedback from targeted customers empower me.
"In my memorial session, I don't want to have a sad atmosphere and make my friends dress up in black. I want them to dress up in my favourite colors and listen to my life stories."
Pre-Plan One's Own Memorial Session?
OR
Planned out by Family Members ?
Second - Round User Interviews
Inspired by my users, a new idea, pre-planning one’s own memorial session comes to my mind. As it is a bold and sensitive topic, I was a little bit worried about my users' acceptance. As I was so excited about this idea, I went to do user research again. The purpose of this user interview is to research the acceptance rate of this new ideas. Surprisingly, my potential users have a high-acceptance of this idea generally across different ages.
72 user samples
18 - 30
91%
30 - 60
83%
60 +
73%
- Design for Owner -
Information Architecuture
Storytelling
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Our user, Sienna is going to plan out her own memorial session by downloading the app on her phone. She logs in as the owner of the memorial session and customizes her own avatar. She can adjust the body condition as well as the clothing and her voice with the technology of deep fake.
Then, she is guided to chose the main church where people meet in virtual reality for her memorial session. Our product provides her with many famous churches around the world to choose from. She can also choose the service of customizing her own space. Farewell utillizes lidar 3-D scanning to make most space work in VR.
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In the plan section, she can generalize the plan for memorial session as well as add legal contact to help her carry on the session after-life.
- Design for Audience -
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Technology introduced & Constraints
Virtual Reality
Lidar 3-D Scanning
Deep Fake Tech
Virtual Reality
With the emerging trends of metaverse, more research is invested into the virtual reality. More and more people have access to vr tools and become interested in this technology.
Lidar 3-D Scanning
Lidar 3-D scanning calculates how long it takes for beams of light to hit an object or surface and reflect back to the laser scanner. It enables the precise documentation of 3-D space without modeling the actual building. The technology is not fully mature but it is already available to the public through devices such as iphone camera. With Lidar 3-D scanning, it is easy for Farewell to customize user's church/space preference.
Deep Fake Technology
Admittedly, deep fake is a very controversial technology. However, with great attention to the security and privacy of cusomters' information, we can optimize the usage of it.
Branding
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Heading 1
Farewell
Heading 2
Poppins, 24, semibold
Poppins, 36, semibold
Subtitle
Poppins, 20, semibold
Body 1
Poppins, 18, regular
body 2
Poppins, 16, regular
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Key Screen High-Fidelity Mockup
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