The combination of tragically low standards for sex ed in the US and the stigma around conversations surrounding sexuality results in the United States being #1 in teenage pregnancy, unintended pregnancies, abortions, and STDs in the Western industrialized world.
Samantha Bushman, founder and CEO of Talk: The New Sex Ed, is working to change this through engaging both students and their parents in the conversation about how to navigate information about sex and what it means to make healthy choices about sex. Talk focuses on real world skills and empowering parents and children to have conversations surrounding sexuality.
In 2018, Talk served 1,900 students by working with 11 schools and programs in the Pittsburgh area. Demand for the program is outpacing the capabilities to provide it. To remedy this, Talk is looking to go digital. We were tasked with developing a virtual sex ed platform that solves Talk’s scaling problem.
Our goal was to design an end-to-end journey for students that helps them evaluate their own knowledge about sex and sexuality through accurate, appropriate, and engaging material in a manner that embodies Talk’s design values. Furthermore, the design should leave room for parent involvement in some capacity. Additionally, it was important to the team that we did not just digitize sex ed, we digitized Talk.
To fully meet this goal for Talk, there were a few things to keep in mind. Our solution needed to:
Based on these criteria, we developed a How Might We statement that lead us through the project:
How might we create a digital solution that enables Talk to serve individuals around the country and effectively fullfil its mission of empowering students with the skills and knowledge they need to make healthy life choices, without losing the essence of what makes Talk successful?
To design this platform that really feels like Talk, we had to begin by studying how Talk works and what makes Talk special.
We began by conducting some contextual inquiries and observation. The team sent members to observe what Sam does inside of a Talk classroom and how participants respond to her way of teaching. The contextual inquiries were followed up by interviews with Talk students about their experiences. We conducted research with approximately 15-20 past and present Talk students to understand not only how they interpret activities in the classroom, but also learn how they take information from the classroom and apply it to their life outside the classroom.
Their answers led us to developing what we call the Foundationals of Talk. These are the elements of Talk that must exist in the virtual platform to maintain the essence of Talk. The Foundationals are:
The first part of our ideation was to use what we learned about Talk to explore the boundaries teens and parents draw in the domain. Sex and relationships are considered to be sensitive topics for many with very specific expectations and boundaries. We needed to keep these boundaries in mind with the solution we made as to not lose user trust.
To do this, we developed a multitude of storyboards to depict a variety of situations related to sex ed; ranging from extreme situation such as “having a robot intervene in family conversation” and “a algorithm that can monitor your online chat history and recommend you tips”, to tame ones, such as “a centralized place to learn about sexual health.” By showing users these drastic situations and studying their reactions, we learned how to stay inside their boundaries.
Using what we learned from boundary testing and our Foundationals, we created eleven unique prototypes to use as research tools. These prototypes had a wide range of features. For example, we created a browser plugin, a virtual classroom, a quiz for couples, and much much more.
Our evaluative research consisted of 10 rounds of think alouds and surveys designed to find solutions to the following problems.
Because our product will be delivered directly to teens rather than through schools, getting teenagers to be interested and motivated to use our solution became one of the primary challenges we tackled. In our user research, we found out that teens won’t search out information or pay attention to it unless they think it’s relevant to them. Teens also don’t know what they don’t know in terms of sexual education knowledge - furthering the problem of perceived relevance. How can we get users attention and make them believe that the intervention we provided is what they need?
Contrary to popular belief, teenagers don’t always feel invulnerable and reckless. In our early research and boundary testing, we found out that teenagers are scared, don’t feel control in their lives, and want to be treated as independent individuals. This aligns with Talk’s teaching philosophy: “We only teach you information and consequences, you are responsible for making your own decisions.” It became essential to instill a sense of agency for teens in our solution.
In order to make our teaching effective, we need users to really relate, empathize, and feel the emotions as if they were having this conversation. We want to create immersion in our product, while also sustaining interest for users to keep playing. We measured this across prototypes using the data from an immersion survey. We tackle this challenge from the following perspectives.
Reactance theory tells us that people reject material that they perceive to have a prosocial agenda. Having explicit resources and technical terms breaks the immersion we mentioned in previous parts and reminds students that what they’re doing is educational - leading to rejection due to reactance theory. To work around this, we utilized embedded design in our solution.
In traditional sex ed teens trust the information because it’s provided by authoritative educators. A big hurdle when committing to narrative only design was how to get people to take the platform seriously and trust the information. Adding to that is the fact that our characters are complex, realistic, and inherently flawed. This leads to mixed reactions from teens with regards to finding the information coming from the characters reliable. In our earlier prototypes we were able to gain their trust by using clinical terminology in the text messages but as we just mentioned in the previous challenge that shut them down because it was too educational. Removing the use of technical terminology made this challenge even more difficult.
The last major challenge we took on was to create a judgement free space. Our users should feel comfortable and accepted throughout the experience. This is a major design value of Talk, and also what makes Talk successful. We want to teach consequences, but one of Talk’s founding principles is that it doesn’t try to teach students values and leaves that to the trusted adults in their lives. Similarly we don’t want to judge them, just want them to think about their personal values and make decisions for themselves.
The product we are proposing is a narrative based intervention using text messaging as the primary medium; we call this Chat Fiction. We have found Chat Fiction to be an approachable medium for teenagers to interact with the material. The primary goals of this approach are to teach sex ed material and trigger conversations about sex and relationships by modeling realistic dialogue for students.
Our solution includes many different Chat Fiction stories to teach different kinds of information, but it needs a unifying framework to tie it all together. One of the central themes of Talk is it’s focus on relationships. This includes all kinds of relationships - romantic, platonic, family, etc.
The Talk Conversational Universe [TCU] is the framework we designed to contain virtual Talk’s content. We created the TCU based on the idea that we can’t teach all of Talk’s content in one continuous story without it feeling forced and awkward. The solution to this is to create lots of stories all existing in the same world.
In the TCU, you play as one character interacting with other characters in one story, and at the end of that story, you “grab onto” one of the other characters in the story. The player then plays as this new character in a new situation. By following all of these characters in many situations, the TCU creates a web of relationships and stories that can teach any kind of content.