Cypress Lawn CemPortal
Early-stage design work for a complex database UI.
Starting Point
CemPortal (short for "Cemetery Portal") is an in-house tool of Cypress Lawn: a large, historic cemetery in Colma, CA. It is a user-interface for a database containing a dizzying number of products: caskets, urns, headstones, and the like; as well as plots of land and services like cremation, entombment, enbalming, etc.
CemPortal is in constant use by the staff of Cypress Lawn. Most often to enter new accounts into the database, but also to manage accounts as they move from initial sale to financing, payment, and scheduling of services. My first task was to chat with the people who use the tool every day.
User Research
The nice thing about designing an in-house tool is that you have easy access to the user base. The people at Cypress Lawn were approachable and easygoing, and had no shortage of complaints about CemPortal, as well as suggestions to improve it.
“It’s not user-friendly.”
“It’s really convoluted. My brain just doesn’t work that way.”
- Justine
Administrator
Uses CemPortal about 2 hrs/day
“We need to be able to search everything. Right now you can only search caskets and urns, so we spend hours hunting through long lists of all the other stuff.”
- Nichelle
Data Entry Specialist
Uses CemPortal
8 hrs/day
“The calculations page gets bogged down. Once you get up to six- and seven-figure sales, it can lag for up to a half hour when you change something in a drop-down.”
- Hoan
Systems Administrator
Uses CemPortal
8 hrs/day
I created a map of the existing tool which corroborated the things I was hearing from users. The tool was sprawling...with many underutilized pages and a labyrinthine user flow with little consideration for normal users' mental model.
Minimum Viable Product Proposal
Initially, the scope of the project was a complete redesign and rebuild of CemPortal. I put together an MVP user flow, as much to help me wrap my own head around the tool as anything else, but this became my first proposal to the client. This version would be optomized around the most common use case (entering new accounts), and would be faster and less expensive to build.
Many of the more admin-oriented features would be left out, possibly for inclusion in a later version, but the existing CemPortal would be left in place to support these tasks.
Wireframes
Many of the screens were not only untidy, but contained form fields that were never used. I worked closely with the client to decide which elements could be removed, and which were absolutely required.
The payment section is necessarily complex, as payment can come from multiple sources including insurance and trusts; and long-term financing needed to be supported. Nonetheless, I strove to bring in as many conventions from online shopping as possible.
I introduced a "shopping cart" like element, which didn't exist in CemPortal before. This was meant to bring some familiar interface elements to the tool, and the people I interviewed loved having the option to clearly review everything before proceeding to the financing section.
Paper Prototype
To help get the project approved, I created a simple paper prototype from the wireframes. Screens were displayed in tablet format and sequenced to walk executives and CemPortal users through the new, simplified workflow.
The project is ongoing, currently awaiting budget approval and developer resources.