Batesville (Marketing Site)

Help families learn the funeral process

Users need to find information that will help them make best funeral decisions for their healing.

Users want to:

• Learn about the funeral process
• Find a funeral home and professional to help them through the process
• Honor their lost family member or loved one

What I Did

Landscape analysis & Wireframes

I conducted a competitive analysis focusing on direct competitors' marketing sites and 2 comparative analyses, one tailored around the education experience and the other around the product experience. In the case of this user base (grieving families), we didn't contact the target audience directly. Instead ,some members of the team went to local funeral homes and spoke with the owners and directors to gain clarity around the thoughts, feelings, and actions in the funeral process. Based on this collective data, I designed wireframes to address user needs.

• For the competitive analysis, I looked at sites like MatthewsAurora Funeral Solutions, Thacker Caskets, and Astral Industries, paying particular attention to the the way products were displayed and organized.
• The comparative analysis for education included death care industry related sites like Beyond.Life and Funeral Matters as well support sites like Canva support and Help Scout.
• The comparative analysis for product collected sites that sold a lot of versions of a specific product like Body Shop, Revzilla, and Dyson which incorporate education into the product experience.

Why I Did It

Users are looking for guidance

From speaking to funeral home professionals about the funeral process, we were able to uncover a trend that families often are unsure or confused about the process when losing a loved one. The person who died may have been a spouse or a parent and may often be the first person for whom the family member ever has to plan a funeral. For this reason, we put heavy emphasis on learning how to teach families about the funeral process and their product options.

• I did a competitive analysis to see how competitors were handling this problem and possibilities for innovation on the current solutions.
• The comparative analyses would provide us with us expanded options for product treatment as well as ensure we were using familiar and relevant functionality.

What We Learned

There is a lot of opportunity to transform how funeral products and brands are experienced online

The learnings from my research were applied to the product flows, wireframes, sitemap, and visual design.

• From the competitive analysis, I learned that similar death care brands weren't showing much of their inventory on their site which we saw as an opportunity to give users more transparency into products available near them by adding location as a major product filter. I also learned that competitors were not typically showing the value of their products by infusing education into the product experience (for instance, why should I prefer this product over others?), so we designed a product landing and detail page that teaches the distinct value of each Batesville product.
• From the comparative analysis focused on education, we learned that and effective search made for easy learning. When the categories on the front page were clearly labelled and had descriptions as well as the search feature was quick and accurate, we had an easy time finding answers and getting guidance from the analyzed sites. These sites all had a similar structure which I applied to the Resources section of Batesville.com.
• From the comparative analysis focused on product, we learned common structures and flows that we took inspiration from, but tweaked to suit Batesville need for the user's location to display the full product availability.

I used learning from the landscape analysis to update the product flow and make it easier for users to find products relevant to them. In the original flow of the site, users would need to go from Landing Page > Category Page > Listing Page > Detail Pop-Up if they wanted to learn more about a specific Batesville product. There were a couple of areas that presented challenges such as the categories of "Classic," "Commemorative," and "Conventional" which weren't fully clear and may not feel like they're leading a user down their desired path. The detail pop-up also left the product image small and the text without much space to provide detail.

I simplified the flow to Landing/Listing > Product Detail Page with the support of the team. The Landing/Listing Page provided extra space for education and the categories were changed into a filter system to make use of familiar language and functionality. The detail pop-up becoming a full product page allows for space to share more information about the product and give it quality feel by using larger and higher quality images.

Feeding two projects with one research

I had moved on to my next role before this project launched. Before I left, I accomplished the following:

Results:

• I developed a sitemap based on the focus of education, guidance, and support for families and funeral home professionals alike which was iterated on, approved, and then implemented into the launched site.
• I created 2 prototypes for Resources section of the site including feature suggestions such as predictive search and a progress bar when scrolling articles and wrote a 50+ page spec doc detailing the functions, interactions, and builds of each module and page on the site.
• The team was able to use the knowledge and information from this project to apply to the Portal project as well.

The Next Steps

Gather analytics and work with Content Strategy

• A step that could have been more thorough for this project was using currently existing research of users in mourning to affirm design decisions. While the research we did perform informed personas and initial brainstorming, I could have been more intentional in using preexisting user research to validate designs throughout the entire process.
• A next step I would take I would analyze the Google Analytics info and suggest Hotjar for heatmapping to check how pages are performing, minding care for how we approach user research while seeing what insights could be drawn from the quantitative data.
• This would influence how we move forward with research and where to focus efforts next.