Missing People Entity Card

Overview

In Q4 of 2021, I was tasked with designing and creating a fully functional prototype for an interactive product to improve user engagement on People.com. During this project, I was given three different topics to create user flows for: Celebrities, Royal Families, and True Crime. One of the specific scenarios was about missing moms in the US. When exploring missing mom content on People.com, I found the representation of the topic nerve-wracking, unethical, and problematic. For example, an article about a missing mom highlights shocking details and induces fear in readers, but it doesn't provide practical information to help find the person or a clear call to action. I understood that true crime content was a big revenue driver and decided to find ways to make it helpful in finding missing people.

Pitching the out-of-the-box idea

While working on the project I was tasked with, I found time to research existing efforts in finding missing people all around the world, both governmental and private. I created a one-pager proposal stating the problem, a few successful competitor examples, and how I’d like to contribute and make these article templates more helpful.

In my pitching, I focused on 4 areas:

1. Background of missing people: People go missing faster than they can be found. Many still remain missing after years.
2. Successful & Existing examples: Existing tools by governments and companies in the world to find missing people.
3. What we can do: (Low Lift) Make our articles display more helpful information; and (high lift) partner with other efforts and use the brand influence to better inform our users.
4. Our Advantage and Impact: The demographic pattern of missing people matches that of People's users. This can help People become a more social responsible brand.

30 Second Exercise: Letting the audience discover the problems

After sitting down with design leadership for People.com for the pitching meeting, I started by asking them to go on the missing mom article page and find 5 key information about the missing person in 30 seconds: where was she missing, when did she go missing, what was she wearing at the time of missing, her age when missing, and who to contact if someone has leads. After 30 seconds, the problems were well understood.

Entity Card: the practical starting point

At the time, I had a very ambitious idea: use the influence of People users and turn the site into a social media engine that broadcasts missing people information in real-time and promotes it in the areas of the missing people. I presented it to my design manager and design VP. They were very supportive of my initiative, provided helpful feedback, and pointed me to a practical starting point: entity cards.

Entity cards were a content block we had for celebrities and royal family members. This card was a table that displayed key information about the person. We also had Entity Pages as standalone webpages that included the entity cards and articles related to the person. Here's an example of the entity page and entity card.

Process

Once I knew what to do, I started designing entity cards for missing people. I conducted competitive analysis and research to understand the most important information about missing people, what the user flows should look like considering multiple user entry points, iterated and mocked up how it should work with the rest of the content on the article page, and how it can be easily shared on social media.

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Final Design

The unexpected twist

While I was working on this side project, my company underwent drastic change: we got acquired and merged with another company. The main project that led to this project was put on hold, and so was this project. A few months later, all entity cards were taken off the site. I also got shifted to a different team. However, I kept in touch with my previous manager, and we continued talking about bringing this project to life in the future. At least, we've brought it into the new design system.