The starting point

Memoria needed a partner for the concept, development and digital marketing of a new funeral service. Ease of use, comprehensibility, reliability and modernity had to be at the core of the online service. Although all services are becoming digital, funeral services are still strongly considered traditional. We wanted to change this conception.

Existing digital funeral services feel emotionless, rigid and often confusing to use. Memoria’s new digital service had to combine the strong expertise and know-how of traditional funeral services with the ease and flexibility offered by the digital world. Currently, Memoria’s most typical customer is not a digital native, but the next generation assumes and expects to use digital services. Thus, Memoria takes a big step ahead of its competitors by building a service for future generations.

Funeral arrangements are still almost exclusively handled by people, but Memoria’s new service provides the opportunity to take care of all the arrangements independently online. The user entering the service goes through heavy emotions, and the service had to take this into account by feeling as humane, safe and easy to use as possible. Memoria clearly stands out from its competitors by being warm-hearted, conversational and modern. The website’s text content is still being improved and the service is constantly developed based on data and the feedback received.

The strategy

Our goal was to design a clear, modern and easy-to-use service that would feel humane, reliable and safe in times of grief. The user interface was designed to be calm and light in its overall appearance. Dark theme tabs pace the content so that it is clear to the user when the theme or topic changes. The service’s landing page presents the entire funeral process in a concise, clear format and highlights the benefits of the digital service. In addition, the landing page makes Memoria known as a company and ensures that customers know who they are dealing with.

The service significantly facilitates funeral planning. All the necessary information is not only in a clear format, but also always available. Instead of long questionnaires, the user goes through the process in the form of a conversation. This way, the transaction feels human and personal and longer entities are structured into smaller pieces of information that are easy to understand.

The service assists the user in making the right choices for the funeral arrangement and forwards the sales order to the nearest funeral home. Memoria’s key strength is that there are always real people in the customer’s proximity who can start taking care of the funeral locally. The service provides information about the order for Memoria’s invoicing and gives the funeral home contractor the opportunity to modify the order so that the invoice can be created correctly. The funeral contractor can also select and price the products and services they want to present in Memoria’s online service.

The creative solution

The design of the online service started with a workshop. Our goal was to understand the funeral process and its stages and to identify what kind of special features there is between different parties. We mapped the wishes, needs and ideas that Memoria’s shareholders had for the new service and built an outline of the funeral process. Together with Memoria, we started to refine the service by going through the user path in detail. We found out what the funeral process entails, what kind of choices the user must make in the service and how these choices affect the next steps.

After the user path was drafted, we started designing the wireframes. Since the funeral process is not quite simple and the choices made by the user always affect the next steps, we ended up building a clickable prototype. This way, Memoria’s team was able to test the logic of the user path and could notice possible errors at an early stage. The prototype ended up having almost 400 separate views and turned out to be very useful for testing and development: unnecessary development was avoided and the prototype acted as a clear guideline for developing the user path.

After the wireframes were finalized, we started the visual design. Memoria’s brand was recently renewed by the advertising agency Ahooy. The visual design was based on Memoria’s graphic instructions, from which we picked out the typography, colors and icons.

Funeral services are relatively unfamiliar to most people, so giving advice to customers was an essential feature. The selected UI and UX procedures allow Memoria to guide the customer throughout the funeral process and tell the user what they must do to complete the funeral plan. The application is a tool for Memoria to give counseling as a natural part of their digital channels. The contents of the service can be developed in a precise manner with the help of analytics since we are constantly learning more about how the service is used. Continuously improving the service and adding more detailed advice is easy.

The results

The Memoria app has received positive feedback and even got an honorable mention in the Grand One 2023 competition. The numbers below have been measured in 2022 from the application’s release (April) to the end of the year.

2000+

Clicks from the site to the app

1600+

App users

150+

Requests for a quote