Obit Research

As a kid, if you had the choice between a boring, old regular book with pages that only had pictures on them, or a POP-UP book with pictures that semi-literally jumped off the page, which would you choose? Thanks to the late Waldo Hunt, you had the choice.

A Chicago-native and World War II vet, Hunt first worked in advertising but lost interest in the field. Instead he became enchanted with a pop-up book from Czechoslovakia. He went on to design a pop-up ad for Wrigley’s gum, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Read more about Waldo Hunt’s life in his full obituary from the Los Angeles Times.

For the past week, our obituary research team has been mocking up some designs of the future Legacy.com. Northwestern professor Jeremy Gilbert graciously shared his knowledge of paper prototyping and usability testing with us, and has been helping us through our initial designs.

Today we tested our tests on two generous NU undergraduate students and got some very valuable information that will help us when we begin our actual testing next week.

The most and possibly best feedback we received was on the homepage design. We have been working on two versions of the page; one with a lot of different information all laid out for the user, and another version with the features and services dispersed into different categories, separated by tabs.

Our research team was pretty evenly split on which design would be best, and I think it’s safe to say that a few more rounds of user testing will solidify which version will be most optimum.

There are definitely some word choices we need to work on in an effort to make search criteria and subject headings more clear to the user. For instance, we think the word newspaper is clearer to a user than the word publication, when they are searching for an obituary or death notice from a particular newspaper or publication. (Have I said newspaper and publication too much?)

But perhaps most importantly, on Halloween Eve, we have decided that we must have plenty of candy to offer to our testing subjects as an incentive/thank you. And we need to make sure that Jake doesn’t eat it all during the testing.

Throughout the last few weeks our team of obituary researchers has been conducting open-ended interviews with acquaintances who, we believe, fall outside of Legacy.com’s traditional audience demographic.

I had the enviable task of compiling all of these interviews, hoping to make some inferences on the general public’s opinions of obituaries. Our sample of interviewees comprises men and women, between the ages of 21 and 42, residing in locations from New York to Boise.

Read more…

I think we can all agree that we would like to steal emulate the Washington Post’s “Post Mortem” blog. The writers break down the most recent obituaries concisely, delivering the most interesting aspects of a person’s obit in easily digestible blog entries.

A post from a few days ago caught my eye, mainly because it had the word Publix in it. Anyone else who is from or has lived in Florida will know why my eyes got so excited.

Read more…

I started this blog entry reflecting upon an interview I did with an old high school friend who is studying film at New York University.

I have known Dan since the seventh grade, and I don’t think a school day went by that he didn’t make some sort of movie reference to whatever it was that we happened to be studying—French grammar, U.S. history, the stock market in economics. You name it, Dan referenced it.

So it was no surprise that he brought up the film Citizen Kane when discussing obituaries.

“Citizen Kane is basically an obituary about this Charles Foster Kane character that’s lived and died, warts and all. That’s an interesting text to me and I would look for something similar in obituaries.”

For a while there at the beginning of the decade, the biopic was as prevalent in theaters as celebrity-dancing competitions are on television. The Aviator, Ray, Walk the Line, Ali, Kinsey, Cinderella Man and a slew of other biographical films all came out before 2005.

This research project has us thinking about what would attract a younger, more diverse audience to Legacy.com, and to obituaries in general. Are movies the answer?

The Aviator, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, opens with a young Howard Hughes being warned of germs by his mother, which we can assume leads to his obsession with germs and other compulsions. The audience also sees Hughes’ triumphs as a movie director and a man about town.

Jamie Foxx’s starring role as Ray Charles in the 2004 film, Ray, tells the story of the great musician, his fight against segregation and his battle with drug addiction.

Walk the Line follows a similar plot, chronicling the life of Johnny Cash, portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, and the Oscar-winning performance of Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash.

There are always inconsistencies between real-life and the film version of a person’s history. However, these are three examples of well-received, popular obituaries, produced by Hollywood, instead of newspapers.

© 1941 RKO/Turner Entertainment, via Wikipedia