Electronic Death

UX Research | UX Design

Team: Herui Chen
My Role: UX Research and UX Design Generalist

Our team worked on a conceptual project to generate a potential solution for what could happen to our digital data when we pass away.

Ecosystem & Stakeholder Mapping

To begin our project, we created a stakeholder and ecosystem map to help create a shared understanding of the problem space and potential relationships between stakeholders. We continued to update these as we learned more through our user research process.

an ecosystem/stakeholder map of "electronic properties after death" with main headings of "using electronic data", "passing ownership of electronic data" and "data management"

Personas

Next, we created two personas to start thinking about the people who may most benefit from a plan for what should happen to their digital data after they pass away, focusing primarily on habits, personal characteristics, and pain points and secondarily on demographics. While we created these early on, we also continued to update them as we went through the user research process.

user persona 1 of Dave, a 56 year old married father who is organized with his digital assets and wishes to give next of kin access to computer in case of his passing

user persona 2, emma, 21 year old who lives with parents and siblings, whose mother passed away recently and she is having difficulty accessing important information

Research Questions

We created 3 general research questions and decided to use both a survey and in-depth interviewing to answer those questions. We broke down our main research questions into smaller questions, some leaning more qualitative and some leaning more quantitative. We used these to create our survey and our interview guide.

quantitative research questions about electronic devices owned, inheriting data, what you'd want to do with your data, appointing someone you know/a professional/or a software to handle your data

qualitative research questions for file management: how do you organize data, would you need to restructure it, how long would that take, are you concerned with mislabeling data, when do you label data, expected software features

qualitative research questions about data security: process for asking someone you don't know to handle data after your death, what qualities would you look for in that person, what would a software app look like, privacy/security concerns?

Research Insights

Our survey had 39 respondents. We asked about age, preferred pronoun, profession/field of work, electronic devices owned that held personal files, if they would like to inherit data from loved ones when loved ones passed away, what they would want done with their own digital data when they themselves pass away, how likely they would be to appoint someone they know and trust vs. a professional vs. an autonomous software to handle their personal files after they pass away, an appropriate cost for such a service, what functionalities they would want in a software created to help you handle personal files after you pass away, and possible concerns about a piece of software handling personal files in that way. The most important and intriguing insights gained from our survey were:

quant research insights, graphs showing who would like to inherit loved one's data and what people want to do with their files when they pass away (delete, distribute, retain)

We held in-depth interviews with 6 people, ensuring we spoke with people who had varying characteristics within our two personas (while also continually updating our personas after obtaining more information throughout our interviews). The following shows the questions asked during our interviews along with the research insights we were able to gather.

table of questions used in interviews. Data overall categories: general info, data categorization and sorting, data management after passing, potential pain points, imagination time, general info

qual research insights: flexibility, speed and efficiency, key functions, and security concern

While analyzing our data and determining insights, we realized this topic was very personal and therefore people could feel drastically different from others about it. The main difference we noticed is that many people did trust software to handle their data while many did not. After cross-referencing demographic data, we noticed those in older generations more often trusted a person over a piece of software whereas those in the younger generations more often trusted software over a person.

Solution Prototype

After consolidating our research insights, we decided to focus on creating a software-based solution for younger generations while being aware that this will not be the right solution for everyone. First, we defined our solution.

defining the solution, integrated into Windows OS, light-weight file management system, decryption key shared with next of kin, when computer unlocks its programmed actions will automatically run

Next, we created an overview of what pages the software should have and started to prototype specific ones, including pages to help the user organize and manage their files for retaining, distributing, and deleting data, and a legacy mode feature for the surviving loved one to be able to access the files the individual wanted them to have.

Overview of the key pages, including sign-in page, file management, and other pages

Prototype of logging in using legacy mode

If we were to continue working on this project, we would conduct user testing and observations while creating higher-fidelity prototypes.