Grief, choice and digital technology use: how bereaved people use digital technologies to support their grief

Despite extensive research into how best to support bereaved people, little empirical evidence is available exploring how bereaved people themselves can shape the technology designed to provide this support. This significant gap highlights the need for both end-user involvement and a user-centred approach in the design and development of digital grief services. In order to do so however, first we need to learn about how bereaved people use digital services when bereaved, which is the focus of this article. Adopting a user-centred approach to understand user needs, interview findings show how immediacy, anonymity, and choice over engagement levels play key roles in bereaved people engaging with digital grief services. Though digital technologies are widely used and perceived as beneficial early on in grief, some participants express concern over text-based communications and social media use, including content type and volume, interactions and accessibility. This paper highlights the variability and limitations of technology use to support grief, providing new insights, through a Choice Theory lens, into understanding the needs of bereaved people to inform bereavement service design, and paving the way for a new generation of user-centred grief support services.