Concept testing for an end-of-life startup

BRIEF

It all started from a big question….How can we make it easier for our loved ones to talk about their end-of-life wishes?

For my Masters thesis or “capstone”, I created an early-stage concept that revolved around creating and sharing one’s end-of-life documentation and medical wishes, called Todai.

Todai is the first and only multi-service platform dedicated to creating and sharing your end-of-life documentation and medical wishes.

I tackled all components for this project, including research, prototyping, + synthesis presented in one lo-fi MVP.

[Final Masters pitch deck can be found here.]

Methods

Todai concept testing workshop with 10 people in a semicircle

QUANT/QUAL RESEARCH

20 one-on-one interviews and over 250+ survey responses allowed for uncovering critical insights, focused around perception of death within different generations.

Ethnographic Research

“Let's Talk About Death” is a short film completed in Adobe Premiere which includes recorded clips from qualitative research.

Immersive Research

Volunteered with the Reimagine 2018 End of Life Conference NYC while also attending, facilitating, and volunteering at a number of Death Cafe's.

WORKSHOPPING/Prototyping

Multiple workshops and website mockups assisted with rapid concept testing. Focus of one workshop was to prototype a physical space for end of life planning.

tools

Competitive Landscape Matrix: x axis = reactive to proactive, y axis = single service to multiservice, inside matrix are 15 logos of companies in the death care space and where they fit in this matrix

1 - Strongly Disagree - 6 - Strongly Agree

COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPING

Competitive Landscape Matrix paved the way for concept development. This matrix was based on two metrics, single vs multiservice platforms and reactive vs proactive services.

QUANT RESEARCH

Over 250 quantitative surveys were received and analyzed through Qualtrics. The most developmental insights were found by parsing interviews based on demographic data, an extremely useful feature of Qualtrics.

JOURNEY MAPPING

Journey Mapping allowed for a deeper understanding how individuals confront their own and their parents end-of-life. This includes their touchpoints, obstacles, and barriers.

Customer Journey Map with phases of journey on x axis and emotional experience on y axis

Learnings

Screen Shot 2019-05-13 at 5.52.47 PM.png

This project stemmed from researching end-of-life conversations. We know death is taboo. Emotional + practical barriers hinder people from having these conversations, even ‘woke’ Millennials.

Because biases are so pervasive in this space, I restructured the first survey iteration to avoid quantitative bias.