Scaling an existing sex education curriculum through an interactive narrative experience.
User research
Interaction design
Service design
Project management
Sex education non-profit
January 2020 - August 2020 (7 months)
The United States is #1 in teenage pregnancy, unintended pregnancy, and STDs in the Western industrialized world. Sex education in the classroom is failing students, and digital sex education interventions are not currently filling this gap.
In 2018, our client, Talk the New Sex Ed, served 1,900 students. Demand for the program is outpacing its ability to provide it. As a result, we were engaged to create a digital sex education solution.
Our main goals were to keep students engaged, teach them new skills in many subjects, and be easily scalable.
Going through multiple rounds of design, research, and iteration, we ultimately created The Talk Conversational Universe, an interactive narrative mobile game that introduces students to sex education through engaging narratives set inside a fictional world.
Designed for students who are looking for engaging ways to learn sex education material, the Talk Conversational Universe is inspired by popular applications such as Choices and Hooked.
In the game, students are introduced to a fictional universe where they learn about characters who are trying to navigate the world of sex and relationships. As they proceed through the experience, students are exposed to educational material that teaches them important skills to apply in their lives in the future.
Sex education material is hidden in “tea” (or gossip) to keep teenagers engaged with our characters and stories.
Kaufman & Libby, 2012 found that experience-taking with a character in a fictional story can increase internalization of that character’s personality traits, and mimicry of their behavior. We wrote relatable stories so students can relate and learn from the narratives.
Interactive narratives were also a perfect medium for our client. As a non-profit, they do not have unlimited resources to build a game. Written content presented in a text message format can be quickly scaled and delivered with minimal code and illustrations.
We intermixed on-topic educational content with fiction to make our material more approachable. Within the stories, students are presented with opportunities to learn more about sex and healthy relationships.
This design decision draws upon embedded design research on how to persuade individuals to adopt different behaviors. We used embedded design strategies such as intermixing, obfuscation, and distancing.
A variety of gamified interactions help to increase player immersion and keep the experience fun.
Throughout the narratives, players are presented with funny gifs and memes. They can alsomake choices to change the outcome of their character's lives.
These story decision points showcase potential consequences of each decision. In addition, we believe that these decision points are an opportunity for Talk to measure student knowledge at various points of the story.
Our initial research efforts were focused on gaining a better understanding of the existing digital and physical sex education space. We conducted an academic literature review, competitive analysis, and user interviews with various stakeholders.
We also conducted interviews with Talk students and Talk parents to understand what Talk’s current sex education experience was. We knew that Talk was successful in providing high quality sex education to students, and wanted to understand what elements of the existing experience could be replicated in a digital space.
As we built our understanding of the problem space, we began rapidly prototyping ideas. We built low fidelity prototypes for the concepts we wanted to further explore. Then, we invited our target users to use the prototypes and provide feedback. We built a wide variety of different concepts.
Some ideas included a reflection tool to help teens know whether or not they were ready to have sex, a conversational user interface to help mediate conversation between parents and children, and also a digital sex education platform.
Ideation Methods: Reverse Assumptions, Crazy Eight Sketches, Storyboarding, Speed Dating, Rapid Prototyping.
In the current Talk curriculum, educators tell stories and anecdotes to highlight misconceptions about sex. These stories help to engage students in the material, and serve as carriers for increased conversation. We found that students enjoyed this part of the class the most.
I built a customer journey map from our interviews to help us discover this insight.
One simple prototype taught us a valuable lesson. In this prototype, I built a mock online sex education experience, where students watched a video, and then completed a quiz. We weren't expecting anything surprising, but when we tested this prototype, participants would skip the educational video. If students did not watch an educational video in an experimental setting, there was no way they were going to watch educational videos in their free time. This insight helped us to pivot towards solutions that presented educational information in less overt ways.
3 simple lo-fidelity screens taught us that we needed to hide educational material from students.
"I didn't watch the video because I know everything already" - Participant who did not know everything.
Something that we heard time and time again during our interviews with students and educators was that students believed they already knew what they needed to know about sex. As result, they weren’t motivated to fill knowledge gaps, because they don’t know that the knowledge gaps exist.
Students became interested in learning more once they realized there was information they didn't know.
"I didn't know that HIV could be transmitted through needles"
One of our lo-fidelity prototypes, an interactive narrative prototypes about HIV, not only taught students new information, but also kept students engaged throughout the story. Based on the feedback we received from users and business constraints to the problem, we decided to move forward with the idea.
"I didn't know that HIV could be transmitted only in these ways"
We heard from users that our early dialogue was too clinical. Using embedded design principles, we rewrote our stories and created more interesting characters to expose players to different perspectives and stories. We also changed the main lessons learned in the story, from HIV transmission to healthy sex and relationships.
Reading text messages can get repetitive. We decided to add more ways that students can engage with the material. Going back to our user research, we remembered that students wanted to feel more agency and less judgement when they make decisions in the space. So, we created ways for them to make decisions for the characters in the story.
We also developed other interactions, such as timed decisions, missed calls, and rage tapping to express anger.
Ultimately, we believe that Talk can build a game world, with interesting characters and narrative, to hold student interest as they learn more about sex education.
A desirability study to help us iterate on our visual design and feel of the product. We chose a color scheme that people felt was empowering, engaging, fresh, and clean.
As we made more changes to the prototype, we used validated measures for immersion (Green & Brock) to test how engaged users were in our narratives. We wanted to make sure that our changes were not making the experience worse.
Talk required a solution that they could build on their own. We envisioned an interconnected web of stories that could build upon other stories inside of the Talk Conversational Universe (inspired by the MCU). Our client would be able to add stories to the universe as they build out more content, much like seasons of a Netflix show. Furthermore, we deliberately chose to deliver stories in a text message format, rather than an illustrated alternative. Text message stories are easy to create and recreate, allowing the non-profit to devote its precious resources elsewhere.
We presented the Talk Conversational Universe to our client and her board of directors, as well as our professors, peers, and mentors.Our presentation was a huge success. Talk is currently working to develop the idea and make it a reality.
Our work uncovered many more ways in which Talk can grow to become a leader in the digital sex education space. Unfortunately, we were unable to pursue all of the opportunities discovered. We outlined next steps for our product and the future of the company in athat we delivered to our client.
Rapid prototyping is the best way to solve for ambiguity. There were many moments in the project when we did not know how to move forward. However, building prototypes helped us to learn lessons that we would not have been able to through research. Prototyping ultimately helped us to research and understand our users better.
Collaboration is key. Never before have I worked in such a collaborative and open environment. I will strive to create these spaces in the future work that I do. I'm very thankful for my awesome team members, who never hesitated to work with me and made this project experience very special.