When designing webapps and consumer services there are some “exceptions” that you might often forget to account for. Like what happens when one of your users expires?
Heard an interesting piece on CBC radio this morning regarding about a myspace profile that became a shrine of sorts to a young teen who passed away. The father spoke about how the page and the ongoing messages and comments left there seemed to help the friends and family with the grieving process. And then he mentioned of some of the (challenging) process involved to try and get the profile taken down after a certain period had passed. Which reminded me of another story from a few weeks ago “Yahoo denies family access to dead marine’s e-mail”
As a product designer, I ran in to this problem myself at CertaPay as we were launching the launching Email Money Transfers service. There was a process by which if a money transfer expired, after 30days the sender would be notified by email to reclaim their funds.
As you can guess, the one exception case we forgot to allow for became know as the “expired” or “dead sender problem”. Sure enough after opening up the service to 6million online banking customers in canada, it became a statistical certainty that a certain number of transfers would be undeliverable (sent say to a wrong email address or with an indicipherable security question) and yet the sender had died and taken their email and online banking passwords with them. Who do we return the money to?
Eventually the banks (who, having been around a long time, were more used to this sort of problem) did manage to help us build a process for the dead sender problem, but it cause some consternation for a while.
And lastly, because you know the internet is such an infinitely resourceful and, ahem, tasteful place; I leave you with this myspace deathspace.com. For the curiously morbid: apparent leading causes of death of myspace users? 1. Trees [e.g. automotive collisions with] 2. other cars [incl. auto pedestian] 3. other people or deliberate [homicide, in confrontation with police, state of texas etc.] 4. undetermined (suicide?) 5. suicide 6. Iraq 7. illness 8. overdose [esp. sadly women and/or heroin]