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.

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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.

This past week I interviewed obituary writers in two different newspapers across the country, The Bradenton Herald in Bradenton, FL and the Greenville Sun in Greenville, TN. Both newspapers were mentioned in 2000-2001 by the Readership Institute as newspapers doing a good job providing obits to readers. I wanted to check what they are doing and how.

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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.

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“’I don’t how anyone did this job before Internet existed?’ … I can tell you how they did because I’ve been around”, said Patricia Sullivan, a Washington Post obituary writer and contributor to Post’s Post Mortem blog.

The internet revolutionized obituary writing like it did most other kinds of journalism. Before writers had to go to the library, Sullivan explained, and sift through phone books and archives. Now you can find phone numbers with a couple of keystrokes.

Last Sunday, Tiffany wrote about an entry from the Washington Post’s Post Mortem blog. Sullivan has been a Post obituary writer for the past six years. She and her colleagues started Post Mortem two years ago.

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“I enjoy my job very much,” Trevor Jensen told me with a pleasant smile. Like most of the other obituary writers, he is also enjoying learning about people and writing them into decent stories. “There’s never been a day when I came to work, saying, ‘Oh man, what I’m gonna work on today?’ It’s a job where there’s always a story.”

Having served as the Tribune’s chief obituary writer for three and a half years, Jensen writes about seven stories a week among the total 15 to 20 staff produced obituaries.

“We certainly have an editor at my desk, but I’m pretty self-contained,” Jensen told me that he finds stories mostly by himself, sometimes getting suggestions from families, friends, colleagues and funeral homes.

“I sit down each day and go through the deck of submissions of death notices in the area and sources I have, trying to find the most interesting stories,” he said.

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In two interviews I conducted with men in their mid-20s, both subjects emphatically answered “DEATH” when asked what comes to mind when thinking of obituaries. One of them, a particularly well-educated PHD student at THE Northwestern University, even went as far as saying that perhaps our research team should think about changing the name of these life stories to something not quite as synonymous with morbidity. He suggested to play off of the term ‘legacy,’ which isn’t as somber vocabulary and relates more to the life of a person as opposed to the death.

Is it possible that such drastic changes are needed to entice America’s young generation to pay closer attention to today’s obituary culture? As a mid-20s male myself, I sometimes find it hard to pick up a newspaper or visit a Web site and spend a lot of time perusing the obituaries section. At my age, I don’t always want to think about the end, especially before the middle or even the beginning have truly commenced.

Maybe changing the actual term is taking it a little too far, but it seems as though altering the stigma could mean gains in young adult readership. The first logical step is to continue to transform the obituary, and even the death notice, into more of a story as opposed to an announcement.

This week I spoke with a 22-year-old friend who is quite atypical in terms of her use of the Internet for someone of her age.  When asked about Legacy and whether she would consider writing in a guestbook of someone who passed away, she said she “would definitely prefer to get a card and personally write it and send it as opposed to something online.” When asked where she would search for information on the grieving process, if she felt she needed it, I anticipated the answer to be search on Google. Instead she said she would go to the local hospital and see if they have resources there.

It surprised me greatly that someone my age, who should be used to the online world and technology by now, should prefer to do things in such a traditional way. I suppose that people born now will be much more immersed in technology as they grow up, but not all people in their early twenties are as comfortable with computers as I thought. This is something we should consider when imagining how obituaries could work better online, that some people, even young people, still prefer the traditional.

When you think of an obituary, what comes to mind?

Death? Sad news? Someone passed away?

Hmm, these are probably the answers of most young people of our generation. But Laura Palencia has a different one.

“The last page of the Economist comes to mind, because I read its obits at the end of the magazine,” she was sitting at a Starbucks, telling me her experience as an Economist obits fan.

Did you remember where you read Ted Kennedy’s obituary? Google news? Palencia got it from the Economist. She even kept looking for Michael Jackson’s for a while.

“It seems they never published it. Then I just read it online on one of the Google news link.”

For some reason, Palencia didn’t find the obituary of Michael Jackson on the Economist. Actually they did one. But still, she surprised me by doing so because I never met someone of my age was so into obituaries, which I even didn’t realize that they exist on newspapers since I knew there was a thing called “newspaper” and there was another thing called “obituary”.

Palencia has her reasons.

“I like reading it to get the perspective of a post-life and the analysis of how this person’s life really meant.”

She told me it’s far more different to write people when they’re still alive than looking back into their life after death, which makes the obituaries seem interesting.

“But I like my news to have a story,” she said.

Well, a very interesting question actually arises from her response here—should obituaries be told in a straight or interpreted way?

Palencia believes that the Economist is doing the latter, which is an essential reason for her to read it.

“Some people think news shouldn’t have an opinion, and a news story should just focus on the facts,” she said. “I preferred an interpreted obituary than just a fact, because I find that a lot more interesting.”

Palencia told me she thought it depends on how a person judges news. Specifically referring to the obits on the Economist, she considers them as stories with writers’ interpretation, which not only tells about what happened but what we could think of it and get out of it.

Then I asked myself, what I would prefer if I read obituaries? I think my answer would be exactly the same. An editorial obituary sounds more appealing than one just of facts, doesn’t it? But you may have a different thought. Why not sharing with us?

Another interesting thing that Palencia bought up was her thinking of oneself to write an obituary blurb before one passed away. And the writer who writes this person’s obituary may use it as reference, to see how this person judging his own life.

“It might sound weird, but it would be kind of interesting,” she said.

I’ve spent part of my day compiling interviews I’ve been doing with people my age (32-41) about what they like and don’t like when it comes to obituaries in print and online.

Here are some things they said that I find especially interesting:

My interviewees don’t use social media, such as Facebook, to memorialize people. One person said it would be “weird” to see a memorial page there, and on first thought I think so too. My interviewees talked about wanting to remember someone in a more private way, and I’m interested to know if this is a generational thing, or something else.

My interviewees are also unanimously opposed to paying to read archived obituaries, sign guest books, or pay for online obituary services, including paying to have a journalist write an obituary for them. One even expressed disgust at the monetization of the grieving process. I also tend to agree with them, but I don’t agree with putting online content behind pay walls, in general.

Similarly, they were critical of advertising on memorial Web sites. Some thought there shouldn’t be advertising, while others thought it should only be for charities.

I’m really interested to see how my interviews compare to interviews the rest of our group did, and when I find out, I’ll report back.