SolaceClub

 "A tool to help address the world's first problem"

the world's first problem, grief

The idea: Our clients, software engineer Laine Campbell and psychologist Dr. Robyn Donaldson are developing an online platform, SolaceClub, that provides a dynamic set of support tools to address bereavement. They asked our team to contribute ethnographic research towards the design, and to design the on-boarding process.

Team: Steven Albert, Sarah Glanville, Lyra Wilde

Time: 2.5 weeks

Role: research, writing, survey design, interviews, persona development, illustration, prototyping

Tools: Pen and Paper, Paper 53, Sketch, Invision      

Challenge: Our challenge was to provide a welcoming process for members joining the SolaceClub community, and to structure bereavement support through subscription sponsorship as well as other non-monetized support gestures. Additionally, we needed to define the user roles “support coordinator” and “support team member” in terms of need and task management.

Solution: A platform for on-boarding support coordinators and support team members that is welcoming and allows collaborative task management and delegation for crowdsourcing support.

Put POLISHED Wireframes here

Deliverable: An on-boarding design for SolaceClub: A series of questions and images (process) that guide new users or support coordinators to the actions they can take within SolaceClub to support their loved one. Mobile wireframes for a responsive design.

Support is 'love in action'

In our initial design meeting with Laine, she explained how she and Robyn had founded SolaceClub in response to their own losses. The meeting clarified that our role was to develop the “way in” to a tool with real social value. As terrifying as it sounded, we were responsible for ensuring that potential users would entrust SolaceClub as a tool for delivering support to their loved ones during the most difficult experience in life.

 We needed a design strategy for an on-boarding experience that would communicate the value of the service itself, in its totality, so we really needed to dive deep to understand our users. We knew that while our deliverable was ultimately a small user flow, the problem we were addressing was one of tremendous and universal importance, and we all felt the gravity of making our efforts count.

The Competitive landscape

SolaceClub takes a more wholistic approach to grief support than any product we researched. As such, there is no direct competitor. However, there are multiple products across multiple markets that featured components that SolaceClub's offerings. We conducted a comparative analysis of thirty-two companies, from grief support tools to cosmetics subscriptions, in order to analyze what worked well and what didn't in terms of design and features. This helped to inform and contextualize our design decisions, and was another deliverable for SolaceClub's overall product development

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The interviews

The most useful component of our research came from our interviews. We developed interview questions in order to understand people’s experiences around grief. And as you might imagine, we had a lot to consider in our approach.

• We asked people to share their experiences around death, loss, and mourning - the most difficult things anyone has to deal with in life.
• We asked questions specifically around how support was offered and received, and ways in which that support succeeded or failed the bereaved.
• We intentionally included questions around spirituality, culture and family systems and how they tied in to this experience.

Key Quotes

As we transcribed our 17 interviews, we pulled quotes that seemed to be especially useful insights, particularly those that expressed thoughts and feelings echoed by multiple interview participants:

“Decisions were just made out of necessity, and the whole family was needing support.”

“You're never prepared for death— even when things don't look good, you always hope for healing.”

"We made a photo-collage from all the photos people sent. Little treasures I'd never seen! I keep a picture of it in my phone."

"We went out to a basketball court and smashed plates. People yelled whatever they needed to release/communicate to the person they'd lost."

Affinity mapping

We all pulled notable quotes from the interviews and categorized them by the  themes that had emerged. Some of these thematic categories were:

• Spirituality +-
• Gender
• Misguided support efforts 
• Effective support efforts
• Unhelpful gestures
• Gifts and responses to them
• Monetary gifts
• Coordination of Support
• Communication
• Wishes
• Humor
• Long term impacts of bereavement experience

Notably, we found that the most meaningful gestures of support were heartfelt messages to the bereaved, as well as specific, thoughtful gifts. Activities that engaged the bereaved--cathartic releases, like the plate smashing, and creative collaborations, like the photo-collage-- were also very powerful.

We identified failures in support systems, too. Individual members in family systems often needed different kinds of support and were often unable to reach out. Depending on the dynamics between the bereaved and a particular spiritual community, spirituality could be received as either extremely healing or coercive and wounding.

PersonaE

We knew that in order to develop the right onboarding experience, we needed to understand who the 'support coordinator' was. We were asked to develop a support coordinator persona, and we developed our primary persona, Allison, based on the synthesis of data collected in our interviews. We knew her to be someone both close enough to the bereaved to want to help significantly, but with enough objectivity to organize an effective support effort. We understood the challenges that faced people like Allison who were competent nurturers, but frequently over-taxed in emotional crises. We wanted to help deliver something that would not leave her overwhelmed with decisions and a huge organizing effort at such a difficult time.

Allison: the support coordinator

Needs:

• To make her efforts truly supportive to honor her sister-in-law
• To help the crowdsourcing effort with contacts/resources
• Different kinds of support in the coming months
• Unifying gifts/activities for family

Pain-Points:

• Grieving herself
• Has been overwhelmed by responsibility in the past
• Too much effort to onboard/administrate efforts like this in the past

THIS Is where the support team member persona needs to go!

David:the widowe

  A Support system is a system

In fact, we developed a whole community persona system, which my teammate, Lyra Wilde, intuited as orbiting David at a time when his connection to his wife Beatrice is forever altered. In order to create this model, we created personas for each of the family members, using this to anticipate how dynamics might influence their roles and needs. The understanding of this dynamic system, where people's busy lives intersect and separate in cycles, has the potential to facilitate support through a thoughtful design. This visualization would not have been possible had we not used the insights we'd gained from our interviews to anticipate how individual relationships in this dynamic system could interact to generate a real support system.

iterating for delivery

By now our team felt we'd developed an understanding of what we were facing and moved toward from our discovery phase and into iteration for delivery. Before we could begin to approach developing even the roughest paper prototype, we needed to be sure to define what our deliverable would (and wouldn't) do. We did extensive whiteboarding to delineate our "MoSCoW" (Must, Should, Could, Won't), as well as some early iterations of the flow. While some humor relieved the gravity, we determined much of the concrete deliverables through this process.

whiteboard, MOSCOW here for feature prioritization, disaster flow "a" and success flow "b" then repeat prototypes in higher fidelity on "computer"