Farewill

Farewill’s mission is to change the way the world deals with death. They began by creating a platform for writing wills online and have expanded into funerals and probate (the process of managing someone’s estate after they die).

As Design Lead, I have been embedded in the growth, funerals and probate product teams to launch new services and help the company acquire new customers.

There is little transparency about the costs associated with a funeral. In particular, there wasn’t an easy way for people to find and compare prices of the crematoria in their local area.  So I worked with the product growth team to create an interactive map showing all the crematoria in the country and the fees each charge. The map allowed people to search for a crematorium by location or postcode and see all the options available to them with the prices clearly listed.

As well as allowing us to be more transparent to our customers, the project's purpose was to create a helpful tool that we could offer to local authorities and hospitals to put on their websites, creating backlinks and boosting our SEO rankings.

As funerals and probate are at-need services, Farewill’s primary way of acquiring customers is through PPC landing pages targeting people searching for these services. As Design Lead, I worked with product teams to experiment with landing pages with messages, visuals and CTAs tailored for different search terms. We learnt that small changes rarely improved the performance of a page, so we looked at testing more radical changes.

We conducted user interviews to understand what was working and not working about these pages. For example, when testing funeral pages, we often heard that people wanted a clearer idea of what a Farewill funeral would look like. They were worried that we would offer a less personal service than their local funeral director.

To help bring our offer to life, I art-directed and commissioned photography of the flowers, coffins and crematoria we offered, as well as portraits of our funerals team. And complemented this with stock images to show how people might choose to say goodbye to their loved one.

Planning for and dealing with death often feels confusing and complicated. It’s not something many people are comfortable talking about. However, increasingly people are looking for information online. This project aimed to create a resource that was both useful and engaging for potential customers and easy for google bots to crawl to boost rankings for these pages.

As these customers would be finding Farewill for the first time via search, it waas important to elevate these pages to be beautiful examples of the Farewill brand that presented content in a clear, easy to digest way.

I worked with the SEO, content and growth teams to build a content hub full of articles answering frequently searched questions. I lead the design of a content management system for creating articles and curating them into an easy to navigate set of guides.