Sexpedia- Or how to improve Spain´s Sex Education -.
A Design Thinking Case Study
Intro
Sex in Spain is still quite a taboo subject. Everybody says it´s important to talk about it at school and at home, but the research of this case study reflects a quite different reality.
We were given a brief with all the necessary information to start working on this project in groups of 4 people following the Design Thinking methodology.
These were the subject´s highlights:
- Client: Spain´s Education Ministry.
- Generation Z (born between 1995 and 2010) and Generation T (born after 2010) kids are heavy users of internet, smartphones and social media. In many cases, their first source of information regarding sex is pornography and they start visualizing these contents when they are very young (8 years old as an average).
- Since 2013, Sexual Health has not been included in any educational school programs as the result of a political reform that same year.
- Objective: to develop an innovative solution that can provide meaningful sexual information to these generations of kids and satisfy the needs of their worried parents and teachers that do want these youngsters to be educated in this matter.
- Budget: 40.000 euros
Once the team was formed (high five to Alba Uceda, Irene Campo González and MC Estévez New!), the first thing we did was to decide who was doing what from all the established tasks inside each stage of the below:
Once that was defined, we put a timeline together to finish the project in the given deadline (2 weeks).
1st Stage- RESEARCH (Discover)
We started this phase developing the following tasks:
Desk research: all data from this area came mostly from newspapers talking about the lack of sex education plans at a national level and the continued disagreement parents have with the Government trying to instaure this matter as part of the school programs (pin parental).
Netnography: thinking as a teenager, we made simple questions in search browsers and we were amazed at the amount of questions that had been posted in several forums regarding sex education. It was pretty clear for some of the questions made in these websites that youngsters have many doubts and wrong information about critical issues such as pregnancies and STD´s.
Benchmarking: when we searched the internet to see what others had proposed to solve this issue, we saw that some Autonomous Communities (like Navarra and Cataluña)and other countries had developed their own sexual health programmes, Apps, websites and cartoon series. We even found an educative pornographic website, but the content was quite explicit.
Safari: we decided to visit a nearby sex shop to see what teenagers would be doing once inside. We finally ended up speaking with a staff member that gave us the below verbatim sentence:
Once we had collected all of this information, we put up a board with the research questions in post-its divided in three different blocks (competitors, end client and end user).
We decided that we wanted to focus all further research on three different users (teenagers, parents and professionals) and assigned different colour labels to each of them. After this, we selected the questions we wanted to investigate further and distributed the colour labels on them to help us focus the survey and interviews questions by user.
Surveys
Three different surveys were created and sent (one for each of the defined users), getting a turn-around of 144 answers (28 from parents and professionals and 88 from teenagers).
By analizing the results obtained from the parents and the teenagers, we confirmed that there were inconsistencies between both groups.
92,9% of the parents confirmed that it was important to them to speak with their kids about sexual health. But 68,5% of the teenagers acknowledged that they never spoke with their parents about these matters.
Professionals that interact with teenagers and their families (teachers, psychologists, sexologists) confirmed with their answers that from their experience, parents are not up to date with sexual health matters and youngsters are misinformed about this entire subject (they have many doubts, they use the wrong sources and get educated in a different way according to their biological gender).
Interviews
We conducted the above with three different professional profiles, obtaining the following verbatim sentences:
- A Sexologist: “Sex is now another consumer good”
- A Psychologist: “Every year we have more teenagers with gender identity and porn addiction issues”
- A High School teacher: “Laws concerning sex education should not be changed according to the Government that is in power”
Focus Group
Five teenagers (between the ages of 13 and 19) participated in this session. Their key verbatim phrases were the following:
“Influencers have normalized subjects that used to be taboo, such as homosexuality”
“Since I suffered sexual/emotional abuses, I haven´t had any more sexual relationships”.
“We very rarely talk about sex at home; if something is ever brought up it is concerning protection and how to avoid pregnancies”
2nd Stage- INSIGHTS (Define)
From all of the above collected information, it was clear for us that we had to define two user personas. Please allow me to introduce you to Berta and Julián!
- Berta is a 19 year-old University student.
- She suffered emotional and physical abuse from her first partner.
- She hasn´t had any other sexual relationships since that happened and she would like to help other teenagers that may be going through that at some point in their lives.
- Julián is a 43 year-old Psychologist.
- He frequently talks with his son about sex because he knows that if not, his kid is not going to be informed correctly.
- He thinks that families and institutions have not been able to integrate sexuality as another human dimension. Therefore, he wants to set up a weekly workshop/therapy with teenagers to talk about sex and emotions.
Insights
The main findings we gained from this in-depth research and the definition of our main users were the following:
# Porn is the main source of information in terms of sex education for teenagers (Generations Z and T).
# Parents think that they inform their kids correctly about sex.
# Professionals feel that they don´t have enough tools to help teenagers with this subject.
#Sex Education is often viewed/explained as a physical act only
By filtering all of this information, we were able to state what was the problem that we wanted to work on further:
¿How can we we make sexual information appealing for teenagers?
¿How can they have access to this information freely without restrictions and privately?
¿How can we create contents to make them understand that affectivity (to oneself and others) and sex go altogether?
3rd Stage- IDEATION (Develop)
After several brainstormings we agreed to develop Sexpedia, an app with the following characteristics:
- Free
- With a 24/7 option that included phone calls, video calls and chat service
- Anonymous
- Sexual affective contents (videos), covering all different subjects
- Contents developed by professionals (Psychologists, Sexologists, Psychiatrists)
- Videos presented by influencers (or public figures with an influence on teenagers)
- Marketplace for professionals: to offer short, medium and long-term therapies.
- Contents presented in Stories (Instagram) format
- Possibility of having testimonies, search bar, and accessing the tool with your ID number
We conducted a MoSCoW analysis to sort out which of these ideas would be included in the final prototype:
After that, we defined the business model and the value proposal that would help us even more setting up the prototype.
To find some inspiration, we searched the web to see what other companies/individuals had developed around these ideas (focused benchmarking). We found two websites/apps that contained sexual health information in different formats: one oriented towards parents (Amaze) and another one oriented towards adults (Santa Mandanga)
At this point, we defined the site map and the flow charts for each of our defined user personas (Berta and Julian) to have a much clearer path on what we needed to define in Sexpedia:
As you can see in the below moodboard, we selected more less the same colors as the ones used in the Ministry´s website combined with the ones used by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition. In terms of the fonts, we selected two that were clear and understandable with different sizes, Lato and Hind:
4th Stage- PROTOTYPES (Deliver)
Now we had all the details we needed to start working on our App´s prototype, which would also be introduced by a landing page!
Want to see the results?
Landing page (Vimeo video)
Prototype (Vimeo video- Berta´s Journey- accessing the 24/7 area and chatting with a staff member)
Prototype (Vimeo video- Julian´s Journey- registering himself as a professional in the Marketplace area)
Prototype (Vimeo video- Julian´s Journey- checking his details as a registered Psychologist in the Marketplace area)
Testing
Once we were happy with the prototypes, we showed them to some of the interviews/focus groups participants and we obtained the following verbatim sentences:
“From a user point of view, creating that sense of trust is going to be the most difficult part”- Focus group teenager-.
“I have really liked it. I think the idea is quite original, practical and covers many areas”- Interviewed Sexologist-.
Findings
Research is key. We all started the project thinking about a solution to the issue, but as we got deeper into the investigation, our views on the assignment changed. And so did the final solution that we presented!
When an issue is presented we always tend to think of it from our personal point of view. Talking with users and hearing their feedback makes you empathize with them and see the problem from a different point of view.
Despite being a long practice and feeling at some points in the process that I had lost my marbles, I have understood the importance of developing a Design Thinking methodology. It gives you personal insights from present and potential users and this makes you correct your approaches on the subject.
