Digital Legacy

The person who set this up is gone. The people using it are grieving, and some of them are old.

Digital Legacy hands a person's data to their family after they die. That sentence is the whole design problem: the user is not the customer, and they arrive at the worst moment of their year.

A death has to be evidenced, a temporary account issued to the family, and the data made available to download. Each of those is a form somebody is filling in while grieving. Behind it sits a console showing the applications as they arrive, where each has got to, and the documents attached.

How few steps can a transfer of this kind survive? Security wants proof, and proof means forms; grief has no patience for them. Every screen sits somewhere on that line, and the position has to be chosen rather than defaulted into.

The path runs long before it runs fast — finding the feature, naming an heir, changing your mind, and only then the part that happens afterwards. We began with desk research and a content guide, since here the words come before the layout, and carried it through interface, graphics, a responsive HTML guide and a working prototype. Cloud and account behaviour, and the handover between phone and web, had to hold across all of it.

2 separate engagements on this line in 2024.