"Planning my death might help me better live my life." (Baby boomer)

Our app is meant to help digitally-savvy healthy millennials (1982+) learn and plan for end-of-life in the United States, and in doing so, bridge the conversation with their aging loved ones. The app consists of interactive quizzes that employ different levels of intimacy in end-of-life (EOL) questions to target the needs of different user types.

The purpose of the app is to:

1. Take the user deeper into the topic, getting them to think about how they might prepare for their own end-of-life care and/or a loved one’s. 
2. Encourage the user to share the results in order to continue the conversation offline with loved ones. (and acquire new users for product)
3.     Give the users an action plan in order to help them know how to take this conversations to experts that can help them enact their wishes.  

LEVELS

We included levels around intimacy of questions (light, medium and heavy) in order to bring users further into the application and ease them into the conversation.   

The light level acts much like a Buzzfeed quiz—something that you might want to share on your Facebook wall with friends and invite them to take in order to share results. We imagine the subject matter to be interesting facts and anecdotes of death, end-of-life that are historical or contemporary. Light and fun information that eases them into the process without tackling the heavy questions right off the bat.  

The medium level is more personal, and the topic is slightly more serious. In this series of questions, the user inputs what they perceive they might want their end-of-life care/wishes to be. At the end, the user is encouraged to email their list to friends and/or family in order to ask them to do it themselves and compare their results.

The heavy level is the most serious in that it asks the user what they might do if they had to see to the end-of-life care of a loved one. The end result of this quiz is a checklist with recommendations for an action plan. The list even may include local experts or digital resources that they might want to continue studying.

USER TYPES

Our two main user demographics are:

The Millennial (1985+)

The Baby Boomer

36 QUESTIONS

Overall, we imagine the idea of the questions to have the same virability, interactivity and intimacy as the popular Modern Love column from 2015. 

The article described a study from 20 years ago in which a psychologist posited that if two strangers sat across from each other, looked deeply into each other’s eyes, and were open to the possibility of falling in love, then a series of 36 questions might bring them together. The questions got progressively more intimate, and over the course of the beginning of 2015, the questions generated a lot of attention. People shared it on Facebook. Online daters used the questions on first dates. Even today, it’s recognizable. Basically, just like the article is titled “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” our app will pivot that idea into “To Take Care of Any Loved One, Do This.”

INTERVIEWS AND FINDINGS (Phase 3)

We conducted interviews with millennials and baby boomers  to test key assumptions and came up with some interesting findings that we would use to hone in our product questions, app feeling/mood, next step functionality and overall design. Here are some general conclusions:

1. People have a hard time talking about end of life care and death. It’s a very sensitive topic, though the sensitivity varies according to country, religion and age.  We also found in some families,  parents and grandparents don’t even bring this topic up because they feel they should shield the children from this.

• Take home: This indicates that there is a need for a intermediary to bridge the conversation. In addition the mood/tone of the app should be sensitive to this.

It's a difficult topic to talk about and most people don't like talking about it. (millennial)

2. After starting the conversation for a few minutes, we noticed that people start to get MORE comfortable as they share. At first most people don’t elaborate but as the relationship builds they start to open up.

• Take home: this gives us confidence a tiered intimacy level app would be effective. 

3. Millennials and baby boomers' concerns about EOL are very different. Millennials think of end of life care in a regards to spirituality having biggest concerns about mental & spiritual state at the time death. While baby boomers talk a lot more about the physical care including concerns about pain, caregivers and importance of not being a burden on their families.

• Take home: Make sure to be sensitive to the different relationships and concerns different target audiences have with death and modify questions and information accordingly.

4. When asked directly if they agree with the core concept and assumptions of this product, the majority of people in both demographics said they would download an app like this. But they thought of the delivery of the information they in different ways.

• Millennials, who have a behavior to think about technology as a tool, would research and look for an app. It would be easy for them to understand this as a way to help discuss EOL with their parents.
• Whereas baby boomers would would like to see a paper option and most likely only hear about this if there was direct (referral) or indirect (media) recommendations made.
• Take home: It would be important for this product's success to have different options of distribution for different demographics. Also it is important to view these entry points when looking at user behavior and marketing. 

"Yes. I can see myself downloading an app like this. The biggest motivation would be curiosity to see what I could learn from it and if it would really help me make a plan.”

4. The main issues that the app can address are:  

• Educational insight about and how around EOL planning
• Bridging the conversation gap between millennials and baby boomers 
• Creating a sense of peace around a uneasy topic
• Create actionable next steps 

DESIGN THINKING PROCESS

During the course of 3 months the OpenIDEO LA Chapter met multiple times to take part in all three parts of the design thinking process.

1st Phase: Research

We held an event for about 10 people to talk about our own experience with EOL and planning. We started the meet-up by watching a few minutes of BJ Miller’s TED Talk “What really matters at the end of life” to contextualize why and where design thinking can be of use. Then after a brief description of the stages of design thinking, we discussed the challenge, challenge goals and how that fit into the research/empathy stage of design thinking. We also checked in with Celeste Headlee’s “10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation” and used sample questions to ease into discussion about their experience with death. Finally as a group we synthesized the findings, talking about salient points and, in a later session, broke concepts and stories down into general themes.

2nd Phase: Ideation

We held an event for about 6 people where we went through two post-it ideation exercises. Tania and I presented our synthesized research from the previous meeting and placed them where they existed in the entire process of planning for death. After reviewing these we grouped them according to the buckets outlined by OpenIDEO. Our first exercise was thinking BIG about any and all concepts. Then we voted on the ideas and broke into two groups where we synthesized and created a story board for the two most popular ideas. After the event each team worked on writing up the content for each concept.

3rd Phase: Refinement

Before the event the 5 team members for this idea met and created a plan to each interview a few millennials and baby boomers to test our core assumptions and value proposition.  

Almost 10 people joined to work on creating personas and experience maps for the idea. There were 5 people that didn't have much experience with the concept so to break the ice we started with pairs interviewing each other about their own experience.  From there, in two groups we drew personas for "The Millennial" and "The Baby Boomer" and then used that to inform a experience map. 

(Updated 8/2/2016)