Custom web platform
Aura platform is a newly established company owned by over 300 small shareholders that is quickly becoming a movement for change to open up the dialogue on death and dying. Aura is a safe, online platform that uses the digital space to humanely assist people towards the end of their life. Through facilitating conversations, leaving wishes and practical information, individuals can use Aura to create a safe place for their legacy and a memory lane for their families.
The idea behind the Aura platform came from a personal need of a man who was diagnosed with motor neuron disease, sadly, a terminal illness. Instead of giving it all up, the founder chose to leave a mark and share with others what he found helpful for himself. This is how Aura, a platform that provides a place for emotional and practical support, was envisioned.
In a series of workshops, we agreed on one goal - the platform should be a place where people can find a new way to make difficult moments easier to bear. Our goal was to ensure an intuitive UI and to build an easy to use platform, friendly to everyone regardless of age or background, focusing on delivering inviting UX design.
By bringing users’ emotions and needs in focus, our team designed a soothing and useful user journey that invites visitors to discover more about the subject of managing the end of life.
The logo design was guided by Aura’s essential mission – to keep memories alive. Our design team was inspired by a simple infinity symbol and integrated the symbol gently into letters, creating a floating aura. The infinity symbol in this case strongly suggests that everything on Aura is meant to be preserved and cherished long after someone is gone.
Considering Aura’s specific target audience, our approach to branding and visuals was to use warm colours that evoke the impression of spirituality. This includes a combination of purple, blue and white. The choice of colours complemented a user-friendly and calm user interface, enhancing the environment of a safe and friendly space that supports and invites users to join.
Aura gained a lot of attention as a unique solution. At first, we built the promo Aura website that launched in December 2020. The website was to primarily provide early adopters with the very essence of the platform and its mission, allowing users to become familiar with the idea of such a one of a kind platform. The promo website was a friendly WordPress CMS that allowed authors to manage and curate the content sections easily.
The promo website left a huge impression and was a reason why the Aura team has been successful in their first crowdfunding campaign. They managed to raise £177.458 which allowed them to continue development and launch the MVP version of the platform.
Our team worked eagerly on the MVP version in order to provide a highly usable digital product that will engage end-users and provide them with a rich user experience.
That resulted in the success of the second round of crowdfunding campaigns where the Aura team managed to raise above their funding target (£681.027 in total), ensuring the next round of fine prospects for the platform's future development.
The development process of the MVP platform included designing and building a clear and intuitive user journey from the very first step. The goal was to create an effortless signing up process and attractive user onboarding that will guide users further to other rich user engagement features.
Aura allows users to join via an easy sign-up process. In order to finish signing up, users need to add personal information and a profile image. They can set up or invite their trusted persons as well as family members to join and collaborate on their Aura profile. Before they start, each user can take a platform tour and meet all the available features on the website.
After they set up their profile, users can start with adding details that include visual and descriptive parts of their current life, life story, wishes, practical information and other options that Aura allows at the moment.
In order to ensure a practical and insightful journey all over the platform, we developed several key features. The Aura team ensured that each feature is thoughtfully designed and able to fill out the needs targeted users may have at a certain period.
A user can use this feature to record and securely store all important information digitally, ensuring that information is available to a family and close ones at a certain moment. This feature acts as an online information organizer that can be a safe place for any financial information, card numbers, bank accounts, important documents, social media accounts or key contacts.
Users can curate and highlight any moments of their life that can later be shared with their family and friends. A life story is a collaborative feature for users to leave memories and inspirative stories to their families, keeping different digital possessions or anything else that reflects the best moments of their life. Users can add documents in PDF format, texts and images or embedded videos from Vimeo or YouTube, all that is meant to tell the personal story.
All images, video links and documents will be available for families to access any time they desire and they can also continue to share more images to keep the remembrances alive.
This feature allows users to curate what happens before and after they die. There is a whole host of end of life options and preferences such as details of the will, last wishes for the funeral, and other information important for the families. We made sure users feel safe when using this feature by building a reliable and secure platform where everything remains protected and safely stored.
This is a unique feature that introduces collaborative engagement on the platform built to enable users to connect with loved ones and create the Aura Life Story together. With this feature, Aura helps users to select a person from their connections to receive messages, see shared information in Practical information and Wishes, and choose a Trusted Person who is allowed to set the status to deceased and date of death for the user they were chosen by.
The Heartfelt messages feature was built to help users avoid dealing with the regret of not saying anything. With this feature, one can leave heartfelt notes to loved ones by scheduling messages for sending before and after someone’s death. The messages can be prepared in advance and scheduled to be sent in the future.
Besides the scheduled messages, the platform also allows users to talk to their connections via Conversations. Through an easy search bar, users can find the wanted connection and send instant messages.
Reminders are the feature we developed keeping in mind the profile completion rate for each user. Email reminders inform users about pending connection requests and other cases.
From funeral arrangements to finding an attorney, many can experience stressful situations, and feel emotionally overwhelmed, specifically considering different health conditions. Leaving peacefully is a luxury for most people and Aura aims to change that with insightful resources.
Aura blog helps users and their families reduce their worry and distress about dying. A Knowledge section is curated with many useful answers for those who are facing final challenges. Aura authors, including the founder, are there to provide answers for those uncertain about many things such as writing the will or finding proper medical care. Aura founder also shares his personal final journey on the blog.
As Aura deals with sensitive and personal data, we integrated and implemented data security measures to ensure quality protection.
2-factor authentication is implemented for the user's profile and stored user data is highly protected and safe within several stages of encryption. Aura uses Amazon Web Services S3, which is the gold standard in secure data storage.
Every page and part of the Aura platform uses SSL encryption. SSL allows authenticated and encrypted connections between computers meaning all data transferred between those devices remain private.
The Aura platform has been built with GDPR at the forefront which means that users are in charge of their data.
Symfony is an open-source framework that provides a number of beneficial features for building complex and powerful web projects.
Learn more
Is a revolutionary toolkit made by Facebook, designed to build the most appealing, interactive and intuitive user interfaces.
Learn more
The platform’s mission is to become the go-to, one-stop-shop for everything related to the end of life.
