Dignity

Dignity is a long-established group of high-street funeral directors that historically hasn’t delivered digital experiences very well. In 2025, they acquired Farewill to help improve their online presence and broaden their customer offerings.

I’ve been working as part of a product team to help Dignity transform its digital experiences, removing friction and making things easier for customers.

Pre-paid funeral plans have become an important part of the funeral industry. More and more people are planning ahead, often choosing no-fuss options. As a traditional funeral director, Dignity can offer a huge amount of choice (including coffins, cars, locations, and so on) but this can feel overwhelming for people who simply want the peace of mind that their funeral costs are covered.

Dignity’s online checkout had become overly complicated, with too many steps, too many choices, and too much information. I completely overhauled the checkout so it no longer asked customers to make lots of individual decisions, and instead focused on a few simple but important questions. We could then recommend packages that best suited their needs.

This new journey is much quicker for customers to complete. It focuses on what we know are the main goals of the majority of people who search for a funeral plan online. We then direct anyone looking for a more bespoke plan to make an appointment at their local Dignity funeral director’s branch.

Being able to offer related services is a huge opportunity for funeral directors. For example, after someone has died, their family will often need a grant of probate to deal with their estate. This is the legal process of managing their money and property so their inheritance can be passed on. For many people, this is an additional source of stress at a time when they are grieving. It’s difficult to do it yourself and expensive to use a solicitor.

In 2025, Dignity launched a new probate service, aiming to make the process simpler and better value for their customers. Aiming to reduce costs by minimising the manual work solicitors currently do to collate paperwork from someone’s estate.

To explore how we could simplify the process, I created prototypes for a customer portal that could integrate with case-management software. This would provide customers with an easy and secure way to share a range of documents with their legal team. Key information is then pulled from these documents and checked by the solicitor.

The Dignity Group has a number of websites for different areas of their business (such as individual funeral director branches and specific products like funeral plans) and different brands (such as Simplicity Cremations and the Crematoria Memorial Group). There’s no consistent design system used across each, and adherence to accessibility standards is often poor, with low colour contrast and text that’s hard to read.

Dignity wanted a new design system that would create a coherent approach for each of their brands, and would allow them to reskin some of the flows we’d already built at Farewill.

I worked with our front-end engineer to create a new design system with tokens and variables for each brand in the group, that would each map to the same structure as the Farewill UI library. Allowing us to easily recreate customer journeys, such as online checkouts, for multiple brands.