And thus our 10-week project has … kicked the bucket. As the end has arrived, we hope you learned something new from our exploration of the obituary tradition.
For those of you new to our blog, eight students participated in the fall 2009 Medill Interactive Innovation project. We were charged with two challenging and complex tasks: to (1) perform detailed research of the American obituary, and (2) to reinvent Legacy.com, an obituary publishing company that partners with newspapers across the country and one of the internet’s 100 most visited websites. For eleven weeks we worked, eventually releasing “The State of the American Obituary”, a report chronicling the history of English-language obituary culture. Finally, taking into account the changing media landscape and its effect on print media, we released a series of recommendations and design ideas that we believe can transform Legacy into the hub for commemorating loved ones in America. (Please read more about our project in our first entry of October 2, 2009.)
In this blog we explored not only this project but all things “obituary”. Read our favorite obituaries of the week posted several Fridays throughout the project. Read our humorous compilation of synonyms for death, and read our interviews with Washington Post obituary writer Patricia Sullivan and Tribune obituary writer Trevor Jensen. Read about our design process in “Testing the Tests”, and read our series on obituaries from different English-language countries which began with England on November 11.
And please, keep exploring — there’s so much more on this blog and beyond.
Thanks for following us!
Sincerely,
The Team
We conducted a focus group yesterday to get a sense of how people feel about our new design of legacy’s Website. As an observer, here are some of my rough findings.
- Most people don’t like the brown color. They prefer something warmer and upbeat, such as orange or other welcoming colors.
- At the first glance, they couldn’t get the point of the editorial page, especially the name of “featured lives”. But when they further explored on that page, they found it valuable to read. So it seems the most important thing is how to impress the first-time user and lead them to check that page.
- Almost everyone loves the memorial page. Someone said, “It’s very warm, personal, and well-organized without any unnessary ‘flash’.” They all believe that a lof of bereaved and friends/family would like this page a lot and highly potentially pay for this service. Also, they really appreciated the virtual candle idea.
Be sure to check us out at http://twitter.com/ObitResearch for your Obit Research updates. We’ll also be adding a “Twitter Feed” to the sidebar of the homepage that will stream the latest Tweets from the team. Look for links to our own stories, quick hitters that will point you toward interesting obituary news outside the website, and much, much more.
As always, thanks for visiting!
Hello loyal and faithful readers of this blog – I know you’re out there somewhere. The first major phase of our research is in full swing as we conduct a nationwide survey of people’s habits regarding obituary consumption and online memorial participation. We’d love for you all to take this survey and become a part of this process.
One of the major goals is to learn more about a potential audience for online obits and memorials, and to find out what they think is interesting and important in the world of Internet mourning.
Don’t worry – it’ll only take a few minutes and it will help us with our examination of today’s obituary culture. And, as an added bonus, you could win an iPod Touch or a Kindle.