Designing an End-of-Life Planning Ecosystem
The client and specific product names in this case study have been withheld at their request, since several of these products haven't launched publicly yet. The problems, decisions, and reasoning below are unchanged.
This platform helps people record their personal affairs, for themselves and for the people they leave behind. Rather than a single app, it's an ecosystem: a marketing site, a personal dashboard for managing your estate, a knowledge base on death and inheritance, a standalone remembrance product, and a set of supporting services, including a post-forwarding integration after a death is reported.
As freelance UX/UI designer, I worked directly with the founders across most of these products, taking features from early concept through wireframes, high-fidelity UI, and UX copy. The throughline across all of it: making emotionally difficult, often-avoided processes feel simple, guided, and human, for an audience that skews less digitally confident than most consumer products are designed for.
This case study covers four of the areas I worked on: the core dashboard, a charitable-giving selection flow, the remembrance product, and the knowledge base.
Confidential — a Dutch consumer platform, pre-launch
7 months
September 2025 -
March 2026
Chapter 1 — Turning an empty dashboard into onboarding
Chapter 1 — Turning an empty dashboard into onboarding
The platform's core product is a dashboard where users manage contacts, possessions, digital accounts, personal wishes, memories, will-related information, and next-of-kin permissions.
The challenge: A new user's dashboard starts completely empty. An empty dashboard reads as useless, and doesn't tell you why filling it in matters, or how. The brief was to redesign the homepage into something that motivates people to actually enter sensitive, effortful information, without feeling like a form to get through.
What I designed:
A homepage that works as overview, onboarding, and progress tracker at once, rather than a static dashboard.
Replaced generic empty states ("no data yet") with contextual explanations of why each section matters, paired with clear calls to action and step-by-step guidance.
A full set of card states for each module (contacts, possessions, digital legacy, memories, wishes), empty, partially filled, complete, each with its own copy, CTA, and visual treatment.
A "guided onboarding" concept: a dynamic hero and contextual next-step recommendations that change based on the user's progress, instead of a forced setup wizard.
Rewrote the homepage copy end to end, shifting it from brand-led to task-led so users immediately understand what to do next.
Chapter 2 — Guiding people to the right charity, without a wall of choices
Chapter 2 — Guiding people to the right charity, without a wall of choices
The platform lets users pre-select causes they care about, so next of kin can later direct donations accordingly (instead of flowers, during a funeral, or as part of the estate).
The challenge: The list would eventually include dozens of charities. A flat list of that size reads as overwhelming and impersonal, the opposite of what this feature needed to feel like.
What I designed: A layered selection flow. Users first pick themes that matter to them (nature, animals, children, health), and only then see the charities relevant to that theme. On top of the core flow, I designed featured-partner placements, a way to add a charity not yet listed, short explanations per organisation, and a category structure built to scale as more charities are added.
Chapter 3 — Designing a remembrance product to feel human, not like software
Chapter 3 — Designing a remembrance product to feel human, not like software
A new product within the platform: an online condolence and remembrance page, built as a modern alternative to the traditional obituary.
The challenge: Everything about the product sits in a moment of grief. It needed to feel warm, calm, and human, the opposite of a typical dashboard or form-based product.
What I designed: The full UX direction for the product, including the memorial page itself (name, photos, slideshow, personal text, condolence messages, social sharing), a complete donation flow (one-time and recurring donations, preset and custom amounts, payment details), and a condolence flow for leaving messages, photos, and videos, including moderation concepts. I explored several visual directions before landing on the tone the product needed.
Chapter 4 — Structuring a knowledge base on death and inheritance
Chapter 4 — Structuring a knowledge base on death and inheritance
The platform wanted a full knowledge base to inform people on death, inheritance, legal matters, and practical arrangements.
What I designed: The complete information architecture across three templates, a homepage (search, categories, popular and recommended articles, filters), search results (filtering, sorting, tags), and article pages (typography, table of contents, related articles, in-page navigation). I benchmarked a range of existing knowledge bases to inform structure and patterns.
What ran through all of it
What ran through all of it
A few principles came up on nearly every piece of this project: turning complex processes into simple ones, onboarding that guides rather than forces, progressive disclosure, thoughtful empty-state design, UX writing, accessibility for less digitally-confident users, and building components and information architecture that scale as the product grows. Working across this many parts of one ecosystem, rather than one isolated screen, is what made this project a genuine test of product thinking, not just interface design.