Wills for couples — a look at how design works at Farewill

At Farewill all our will specialists (the people helping customers get their will sorted) are in-house — making it easy to listen in on the kinds of problems people are experiencing with our product.

In my first few days, one phone call stood out — someone had filled every part of their will, meant only for them, with both their and their partners details. This meant they’d have to go back and rewrite almost the whole thing.

We dug further into customer questions, analysed the data and spoke to users, and realised that this was a symptom of a broader problem with couples wills. So we decided as a team it was time to improve things.

Our Process

At Farewill we believe that good research makes us faster as a team, and leads to better products. So we take it seriously, and weave it throughout our process.

We started by arranging phone calls with couples who made wills with us. Our aim was to understand not only how they thought about wills generally, but also their experience with our product.

Three groups of findings emerged from our notes:

• Behaviour before starting their wills
• Writing their wills
• Payment and our update service

By understanding the gap between people’s mental models (their beliefs about wills and expectations of our product) and our implementation, we could identify what changes to make.

What we discovered

Couples often own things jointly (bank accounts, houses and so on). This idea is perpetuated by everyday imagery — just look at what happens when you search ‘couple’ in google images.

Perhaps because of this, many couples expect their wills to be joint too.

However, for legal and other reasons, wills are made by individuals. It’s also better if everyone has their own individual account — it means they are in total control (for example, if they get separated), and can also leave personal gifts and messages.

From this, our challenge became to reconcile people’s existing mental models with the reality of each partner having a separate will.

This insight became the fuel for a cross-company sketching session, resulting in a prototype of a brand new journey. Watching fresh users clicking through it gave us the final raft of insight and ideas, and helped us firm up the journey that’s now live.

Some of the changes we made

Being laser-focussed in our copy, imagery and interface

From our research, we hypothesised that saying ‘you get two wills, not one’ at key points in the journey would help bridge the gap in people’s mental models.

This starts right from the headline on the landing page — ‘Get both your wills sorted’, through to buttons and bits of microcopy.

We backed this up with an illustration of two wills together at points where this could add clarity — for example, the payment page (where you can choose to pay for both wills).

However, words and images aren’t the only way to ‘say’ things. The way interactions and interfaces are designed gives people a picture of how the product works behind the scenes.

For example, previously people had to sign up and then invite their partner. By bringing these two steps together into the same screen, we’ve reinforced the idea that each person has a separate account.

Meeting people’s mental models where we can

One of the other things we learnt from our formative research is that most couples have a joint bank account, and the majority had paid for their wills from this account. We’ve simplified our couples payment process so that the first person to complete their will can pay for both at the same time, better matching people’s expectations.

Success?

Right at the beginning we decided that success meant fewer questions to our Will Specialists, and more couples signing up for both their wills with us.

I’m happy to say that we’ve exceeded our expectations on both these fronts, with half of all wills bought last week being for couples, and the team receiving no questions about how to make a couples will.

It’s also been exciting to see the things we’ve learnt along the way trickle down through the company, and start to influence the rest of the business.

If you’ve got any thoughts or questions about how we do design at Farewill, drop us a message below! We’d love to hear from you