Project: Back to Earth - Green Burials Mobile App
Team: Four Designers
My Role: UI/UX Designer, Content Writer, Editor, and Researcher
Tools: Figma, Adobe XD, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Procreate
Project Overview
Green Burial is an old practice that is currently seeing a bit of a resurgence as more people consider eco-friendly and cost-effective funerals.
The idea behind green burials is that it is a natural, eco-friendly way of caring for the dead. Rather than using embalming fluids to unnaturally preserve the body, the body is allowed to decompose naturally. It is usually wrapped in a shroud of some kind and placed in a wooden or cardboard box and then buried. As cemeteries run out of room, other options such as green burials are necessary considerations.
We wanted to figure out a way to make green burials more accessible to those who might be considering this type of death care and also as a way for those wanting to locate loved ones and friends who may have gone that route. We decided to design a mobile app that would do just this. Currently, there are not many apps available that cater to green burials. We would like to change that with our app, "Back to Earth."
Goal
Our goal is to help promote the green burial movement while, at the same time, provide the user with a more eco-friendly and cost-effective option to consider in their death care planning.
Idea
My team and I wanted to create a way for users to search and locate green burial cemeteries and facilities. There's more to it than just green burials, of course. There are conservation cemeteries, hybrid cemeteries, aqua-cremation and human composting facilities, as well as pet green burials. The app would provide a little bit of background regarding green burials as well as some helpful links that users can check out in case they want to investigate further. The app would allow for users to search a particular type of green burial by either inputting a zip code, name of facility, or the address which would then take them to a map with the desired location.
My Role
We conducted user research, graphs, competitive analysis, swot analysis, user flows, personas, wireframes and prototypes over an eight week period. We each performed interviews, surveys, and synthesized that data. From there we each had to come up with our own wireframes and prototypes while drawing from the same style guide. I contributed in all facets of the design except for creating the components.
How Might We...
● How might we help the Green Burial Movement promote their policies and commitment to protecting our environment?
● How might we encourage people to consider green burial over traditional burial?
Design Process
We started out with our project scope – basically outlining the project and our how might we statements. From there, we devised user interview/survey questions in order to conduct our user research. We went into this project assuming that once people found out about green burials and just how eco-friendly and cost-effective they are, they would want to learn more about it.
Once we synthesized our user research, and keeping design thinking in mind, we started sketching out our wireframes for the mobile app.
By considering the issue of green burials and how people react to the topic of death, we used empathy to help understand the emotions behind those reactions - what would make them more favorable to green burials and if they weren't, why? From there we could identify and define our problem statement and begin the ideation process. We were able to draw from our research enough information to help inform our prototypes - such as, what would be included in the mockups, how it would look, and who it would appeal to. Then, came testing the prototypes.
The nice thing about this particular topic is that it involves all of us. We are all, at some point in time, going to die. So addressing this issue, even as unpleasant a thought as it is, is critical and necessary. It also meant there were few, if any, limitations as to who we could interview, survey, and test.
Research Objectives
Our research objective was to prove our assumption that the more people learned about Green Burials, the more likely they would be to want to find out more and conversely, would want to go that route rather than traditional funeral and burial methods.
The interview was kept to nine questions and the survey had seven questions. For the surveys, we had some completed online and returned to us, others were in person, and some were over the phone. A more detailed interview was done with a subject matter expert (SME) – a local mortician who was a wealth of information regarding the history of funeral practices and green burials.
Research Participants
We each conducted three to four interviews and 10-20 surveys and ended up with 43 interviews/surveys total with participants ranging in age from 17-89. They came from all walks of life.
Once we had had all our interviews and surveys complete, we input the data into a spreadsheet so we could compare responses according to age grouping.
What was really interesting about the interviews was the age groups who were more interested in green burial versus the age groups who were not. We discovered that the older generations, those 70 and up, were more set in following the traditional burial method than those in the younger age ranges.
From here, we created bar graphs to further breakdown the questions and answers we gathered. Here you can see the breakdown of age ranges who are more inclined to choose green burial versus those "possibly" would consider it and those who would most definitely not choose this option.
Research Synthesis
As we poured over our research data, we created graphics – a spreadsheet and bar charts, such as the one you see above, to find where commonalities and differences occurred. We then made an affinity map of our findings to sort out that data into sections. From there, we created three personas, a swot analysis, and a competitive analysis. This helped guide us towards a more direct approach when designing our mobile app which we named, “Back to Earth.”
In the affinity map, we broke down those we surveyed and interviewed into age groups, quotes that stood out and various concerns that were brought up over the course of the research.
Personas
We created three personas. The persona I created is Elvira. We wanted to represent different age groups in various stages of life.
The personas helped keep the objective of this project at the forefront of our design and ideation process. It also served as a reminder of humanity.
I could imagine someone's loved one - even my own loved ones trying to determine their best death care options. I would want them to have all the information they needed to help with that decision. And hopefully, with the help of this app, it would be one that gives them a sense of peace, rather than dread.
The SWOT and Competitive Analysis allowed us to keep in mind the different factors regarding green burial options. This would be important in addressing how we present the information on the app. We could see what positives to emphasize and what weaknesses to consider. Certain misconceptions and lack of information could be dispelled through the Back to Earth app.
Pain Points
Two major pain points were awareness and accessibility. The first pain point had to do with how little the general public knows about green burials. The second pain point was that even though people were on board with the idea of green burials, they were discouraged by how few cemeteries in the country currently offer them.
We can see here with "Harmon," that initially, he wants to be cremated. But upon discovering that it is not as environmentally friendly as he believed, he hears about green burials. Unfortunately, there are no green burial cemeteries nearby, so he will more than likely stick with a traditional flame cremation.
Starting with sketches, we each worked on our own low-fidelity incarnations of the mobile app. Next, working in Figma, we designed our mid-fidelity mockups. The idea is that users would use the site to locate green burial cemeteries, hybrid cemeteries, conservation cemeteries, human composting and aqua-cremation facilities and pet green burials. It would also include a screen regarding a person's rights when it comes to burial options.
Mood Board
Creating a mood board helped to hone in on the color palette, aesthetic, and imagery we were hoping to invoke when people used the app. This helped with establishing our style guide for Back to Earth.
Style Guide
I created hand-drawn icons for our mobile app using Procreate on my iPad. With the “Back to Earth” nature of our project, it seemed fitting that the icons also be organic and unique. We went with a green color palette and held to a fairly simple and clean aesthetic for our app. The mobile app components were designed by two of our team members while the logo was created by another team member.
A sitemap helped to flesh out the flow of the mobile app.
Here, we have a gif showing the path of the location result on the Back to Earth app with the high fidelity mockup you see here. The user would input the zip, name of town, address or name of the facility they are looking for in the search field which would bring up a screen showing any nearby hits and then to a screen with a map and a map pin indicating the exact location of the site.
Now What?
As green burial becomes more mainstream, an app like Back to Earth can evolve along with the movement.
Hopefully, we've tapped into a potential user-friendly product that people can relate to, use, and draw comfort from. The idea that this app could bolster healthy, productive public discourse about the topic of death care options such as green burial, is also something that, in the end, would be very rewarding.