Obit Research

This past week the eight of use conducted paper prototyping and tested our ideas for Legacy’s new webpage on a few people. We drew out paper versions of the page and all the sections we want to include, and several of us marched to nearby coffee shops and academic buildings to interview people in our audience age group.

One of the main criticisms that stood out was regarding our concept of an editorial page, a potential section on Legacy.com that will include articles and editorials by a staff journalist, links to Associated Press obituaries, links to interesting obituaries from other newspapers like the New York Times and perhaps a section on who died on this day in history. It would involve mostly obituaries of prominent people, but not necessarily.

We developed this idea from the perspective that there is some journalistic value to the obituary form that needs to be pointed out. However, a problem has come to our attention that the audiences that come to Legacy.com are vastly different. Some come because they are grieving for a loved one, some come to search for someone not so close to them who died, and others come to read interesting obituaries.

Would the first two groups find such a section offensive? Two of the people we spoke to, thought so. One employee from the department of comparative literature at Northwestern University didn’t understand why this section should even be included on the site. It’s a distraction for her, because if she is there, she is visiting for a specific purpose that’s likely not to read interesting obituaries. A section on historical deaths is kind of gimmicky, she also said. Another employee from the department of geology thought that a section like this is kind of creepy, kind of like “featuring deaths” in a similar way to previews of movies in theaters.

This is only the opinion of two people, but the big issue we are faced with now is whether to maintain this section as part of the main Legacy site, or to suggest creating a new website intended entirely for a non-grieving audience interested in well-written, interesting obituaries. If we do maintain this as part of the main page, is there a differnce between featuring an article about Ted Kennedy versus Farah Fawcett for example? It’s a decision that so far hasn’t been easy to make.