End In Mind
In this Case Study
New/Greenfield Design
Growth and Scalability
Culture Sensitivity
Tools and Deliverables
Deep Dive Research
Expert Interviews
Remote Survey
Storyboards
User Interviews
Paper Prototype
Usability Testing
High-Fidelity Wireframes
End In Mind supports caregivers in the workplace.
The Problem
End In Mind is extending their unique wellness programming into the workplace. Employees will need to access their content and tools digitally.
The Solution
User research informed our prototype for the End In Mind employee dashboard, including a message board to adapt the organization’s focus on conversations and storytelling into the workplace.
What Surprised Me
This greenfield design project presented boundless opportunities that had our team fired up. Narrowing the scope for a rapid design sprint was a difficult, but valuable exercise.
View the Prototype
(PDF Download)
The Client
End In Mind (EiM) is a Minnesota-based non-profit founded by Cathy Wurzer of MPR. In collaboration with local Community Engagement partners such as Allina Health and Healthpartners, they are working to create culture change within communities to help people live fully at all stages of life. With a focus on storytelling and sparking conversation, they support caregivers and empower people to make early decisions about end-of-life care. By holding events such as “Death Over Dinner” and “Death Cafés,” they are working to normalize conversations about death and tear down the taboo around this subject in Western culture.
They are interested in extending their programming into the workplace to support Employee Wellness, particularly for employees who are caregivers.
Users and Audience
Our primary users will be employees at all levels within companies, who will be accessing EiM resources through an employee wellness dashboard. Additionally, companies will designate an individual to be the End In Mind rollout “Champion,” or point person, within the company. This person may or may not be a member of Human Resources. He or she will need to be able to access tools for supporting EiM programming in the workplace, including discussion guides and event planning guides.
Given our short time frame for this project, we focused on the above users—Employee and Champion. Future design work will take into consideration the data and analytics that will be useful for leadership within companies to measure employee engagement with the program, as well as the process for End In Mind to continue to add content.
Team and Role
Left to Right: Renata Solum, Matt Gorrie, Linda Singh (EiM Executive Director), Erik Olausen, Jamie Bachaus (EiM Program Coordinator), Cathy Wurzer (EiM Founder and host at Minnesota Public Radio), Shelly Dixon.
My role in this project was primarily oriented around research, including secondary research, data visualization, and user interviews. Our team included Matt Gorrie and Erik Olausen, both strong visual designers and prototypers, and Shelly Dixon, whose skills in observation and storytelling were invaluable.
Every member of our team felt passionate about this problem space. We were drawn to the mission of End In Mind and found ourselves having some interesting conversations about our own values around end-of-life care and decision making—it seems that once introduced, it is an irresistible discussion topic.
The Process
Deep Dive
We conducted secondary research to understand the landscape of employee wellness programs, platforms, and best practices. We were interested in understanding the needs of our various users, the extent of vendor and employer liability where it concerns sensitive health information, and how to communicate the value of this initiative to users.
End In Mind’s values borrow from Zen Buddhism, so we also explored existing platforms and tools for mindfulness meditation and mental wellness.
Expert Interviews
Interviews with Wellness and Community Engagement experts helped us to understand what is involved with rolling out a health initiative in a community. The organizations these experts represented are also potential partners with End In Mind, so they had good insight around the parts of End In Mind’s programming that could be adapted for their workplaces.
These were busy individuals—a linear interview might have limited the types of insights we could gain in our short time with them. We looked for ways to accelerate our discussions. Preparing a large graphic organizer of our questions and areas of investigation was a quick way to give them an at-a-glance look at our knowledge base, and the gap areas they could gravitate towards while talking to us.
Whiteboarding & Feature Brainstorming
Following our deep dive and several expert interviews, we came together to synthesize what we had each learned. We brainstormed features that might help translate End In Mind’s events-based and face-to-face initiatives into a digital Employee Wellness experience.
We took to heart a quote from Jason Fried at Basecamp:
“When prototyping, always try wackier/quirkier stuff first. The deeper you get into a project, the more conservative it tends to get.” - Jason Fried on Twitter
We considered digital conversations around wellness, issues of privacy, and how to connect employees with the wellness resources they need in a timely manner. Our ideas ranged from chat bots, to meditation reminders, webcasts, and journaling.
Storyboard Interviews
It was time to talk to users. I created storyboards of some scenarios involving hypothetical employee wellness tools that could be served up by a wellness portal or email newsletter.
In lightly structured interviews, we presented these scenarios to users who were not familiar with End In Mind’s programming. We asked them to tell us:
What would happen if you were one of the characters in this story, and if this were your workplace? What would be the same? What would be different?
These interviews yielded an extraordinary amount of insight. We learned about employees’ comfort level sharing with their co-workers about their wellness and challenges of being caregivers or of grieving.
Some reactions could be summarized this way: “This would be great… but not at my workplace.” Our interviewees expressed that some of our hypothesized features, while valuable, weren’t practical in a workplace setting due to the culture or the nature of the work’s physical setting and schedule.
We needed an interaction tool that had the potential to create its own safe space within the workplace, reserved for employees who need or desire support around issues of caregiving and grieving. We chose to prototype an employee wellness experience that combined End In Mind’s existing content and resources around these topics, with a message board feature for employees to share and connect with others for support.
Usability Testing
Next, we needed to prototype and test quickly, in order to evaluate and refine our solution in the limited project timeframe. A paper prototype was an excellent way to gain usability insights from 5 volunteer test participants. This process inspired content strategy refinements, as well as additional features. For example, following usability testing, we added the ability for a user to submit postings anonymously to the message board. Participation in employee wellness programs can be a source of concern for employees who do not always trust that their disclosures will be protected and respected.
High-Fidelity Wireframes
The following are selections from our final wireframes. You may view annotated versions of selected screens here:
View the Prototype
(PDF Download)
Conclusion
Next Steps
The End In Mind Employee Wellness portal is a starting point for EiM’s offerings in the workplace. A customized onboarding experience will help connect employees to the specific features and resources at End In Mind that are most important to them.
We learned in our interviews with Wellness Experts that large companies favor a secure, single sign on (SSO) experience for employee benefits and wellness. Third-party platforms, such as Limeade, use an API to pull content from wellness program vendors and serve it to employees in a dashboard experience. In future, End In Mind will likely benefit from developing an API to integrate their content with these third-party wellness platforms.