Assessing Support for Mortality: An Environmental Scan of Online Platforms
Technology has increasingly considered end-of-life support in its design. However, end-of-life support has predominantly focused on certain types of services, leading to online platforms being slow to address a wider array of end-of-life needs. To determine the gaps in support and provide a systematic way to evaluate coverage of platforms, this project documents the functional end-of-life support that major online platforms and services provide. This project finds that online platforms support a narrow range of end-of-life needs, with many platforms providing no support or necessitating unsanctioned workarounds to meet those needs. The project empirically documents end-of-life support across a broad set of platforms and demonstrates the need for more proactive end-of-life engagement by social computing researchers and designers.
