It's no mystery that we generate a lot of data. Every time we log on to Facebook, send a text, use Google Maps or swipe our credit cards, there are small bits of information logged about us. Pretty soon there will be generations of people whose myriads of data are left behind when they pass away. What if we could use this "dead data" and aggregate it and find patterns in it that allowed us to predict when we would die? This concept app explores this idea.
Now, the screenshots and demos in this post are representative of what an app like this could look like. It's not fully functioned and was designed purely to test how people would react to the ability to see and interact with this information. Knowing when you would die, accurate to the minute, is incredibly powerful.
This is the result of a group project I was a part of for a class on interaction design. I worked alongside Lucas Bouchard and Abigail Cotter.
The Design Question
How can we use post-mortem data to predict the longevity of a person’s life while also prompting a strong emotional reaction?
Research
Before we even came close to narrowing in on this concept app, we conducted probe interviews, surveys and secondary research. The probe interviews ended up telling us the most about what direction we would ultimately continue in. Here are some general findings we discovered during our interviews:
- Knowing your time of death and others introduces interesting social dynamics
- Users don’t like to be told how to live their lives
- Ambiguity is not desirable
- Concept implies that death is not predetermined
- Users associate health factors with death clocks
- Some participants don’t even want to know when they’ll die
The concept we provided them with was a narrated scenario and a basic sketch of a clock in which they were supposed to imagine as being the amount of time they had left to live. Participants explored having this "clock" with them all of the time as a wearable piece of technology and as an app on their phone.
Taking into account these findings, we had a choice to make: Do we give users what they want and expect or flip those expectations around and give them the opposite?
Ideation
Although we had come up with 20+ concepts that answered a much broader design question, we zeroed in this idea of predicting when people will die because it was by far the "weirdest" idea we had come up with. It is worth noting however that there are a lot of "death clocks" online that take into account factors like your current health, your medical history as well as your lifestyle and habits. We wanted to account for all of this in our concept, but we also wanted to take it a step further by implying that the concept app drew data from a wide variety of sources, including social media, public records, your health, shopping habits and the people you surround yourself with. The overarching idea here was to convey that almost anything that we do in our day-to-day lives influences how long we'll live.
Prototyping
We tested ways in which we can deliver this type of data to our users, whether that be in form of a clock counting down or by using a set of colors to ambiguously represent how long a user has left to live.
What did we find?
What we discovered was that the use of colors to represent a change in a user’s longevity was a very interesting and thought provoking concept
Here we decided to test the effect of implementing an automated feedback system that provides users with a variety of different suggestions depending on their remaining life-span. We quickly realized that the sole purpose of this app is to give our users this information so that they have a chance to interpret this how they want to.
High Fidelity Prototype
or our hi-fi prototype, we combined several ideas for our low-fi prototype and ideation phase to create a digital, interactive prototype. We chose the format of an app so that this information was always on tap for users. We combined the ambiguous color concept, the death clock idea as well as social integration. When creating this prototype, we looked our user research and the concepts we had come up with throughout the ideation phase. We determined that we didn’t want to give users everything they wanted, but also wanted to promote long term engagement with the app.
Feedback
In Class Demo
We presented our prototype in class and got a plentiful amount of feedback. Our prototype drew “oohs” and “ahhs” when we demonstrated that the death clock changes whenever something occurs, in this case it was a text message from mom and a flight confirmation email. Although the class was impressed with our hi-fi prototype, there were still several remaining questions and comments:
- “I don’t think the level of ambiguity is a good thing for this app. With something so morbid I don’t think a person should be left wondering about what part of the app means.”
- “Is this more of a thing you share on facebook or is it actually something you can base conclusions off of?”
- “Where can you illustrate where this data is coming from?”
- “Beautifully morbid”
We addressed several of these comments, most specifically the illustration of how accurate the predictions are. We add a chart feature that portrayed a sense of accuracy. It also removes some of the ambiguity of the app. We also took into consideration comments about style and decided to clean up the color scheme to what is shown above. The color scheme before was disjointed and there wasn’t much logic to it. The revised color scheme takes a lot of focus off the colors themselves and brings it more to why they change.
Showcase
Part of the project was presenting our final product to the rest of the department at the university as well as guests that attended the showcase. Our demo went very well at the showcase. Our prototype drew multiple strong, confused, surprised, and interested reactions. Through the help of Origami, the software we used to create the prototype, we were able to load the prototype on a phone for a convincing experience. In fact, there were a couple of occasions where users were convinced that the app was fully functional and accurate. We did, however, still get questions and comments:
- “Where does this data come from?”
- “What does the text message say?”
- “Why do the colors change?”
- “Do I have a choice whether or not to share my time?”
Reflection
In the Beginning
- We wanted to figure out a way in which we could collect various forms of data from those who have past, as well as those currently living, and figure out a way in which we could estimate a user’s longevity.
When needed to create a design that both satisfied our design question, which focused more on producing a strong reaction from our users, as well as looking at what we discovered from our user research.
Many of our early concepts were either considered far to intimidating or, in some sense cases, harmless when focusing too much on what users wanted.
These designs varied from hues of colors, vaguely representing a user’s longevity, or a clock that sounded like the countdown from the TV show 24, giving you your exact time of death.
Over the course of the semester, we also came about the problem of deciding whether to design this in a way that helps users or simply tests the limits of social repercussions.
What We Learned
- In conclusion, we wanted something that both ambiguously and precisely represented a user's longevity.
- Now that we had our “death clock” we needed to figure out a way to make our app more interactive and allow our users to have a sense of control when it comes to their clock.
- We believed that this was important in our design because not only would it keep user coming back, but it would also give people a deeper sense of connectedness when using the app.
- This ability to “control” the app helped raise many more questions about our concept.
- Where does this data come from?
- How accurate is it?
- What can users do to extend their “time”?
- What causes a user’s time to change?
- In the end, we discovered that we really didn’t want to give users what they wanted.
- We needed to strike a balance between features people responded well to aswell as features people absolutely hated
- We also needed to find a way to keep users engaged but also keep them on edge in order to push social norms.
- Lastly, we decided that we wanted to give users the chance to evaluate their lives, while also giving them the opportunity to determine what they feel is best for them moving forward.