Hoop | SexEd App for tweens and parents
I was one of the two experience designers working on this 3-week concept sprint during my time at California College of the Arts. I was responsible for design research, wireframing, UI and UX design.
Project Summary
During conversation my teammate and I came to the realization that our experience with SexEd in our countries didn’t prepare us for the future, which launched us into researching SexEd in America. Unfortunately our findings showed us they were not doing any better, and that is where the idea for hoop was formed.
We challenged ourselves to create a platform that could facilitate conversations between parents and tweens about SexEd in a safe, medically correct way and without awkwardness.
We need to talk about sex.
So how are tweens learning about Sex Ed?
Sex Ed stepped up.
Hoop will replace the Awkward in Sex Ed with Transparency, Truth and Togetherness. In order to do that, the app has two different sides to address the frustrations of both tweens and parents.
For tweens, Hoop offers the features Look, Learn and Link; and for parents Hoop offers Train, Track and Thrive.
For Tweens:
For Parents:
Process
Research
To gather insight into the subject of Sex Ed, we interviewed several parents, kids and young adults who recently experienced Sex Ed in America. We also read articles about how Sex Ed can impact a person's life, different ways progressive schools have been approaching Sex Ed and many more. Lastly, we did a comprehensive competitive analysis to really understand where the gaps in Sex Ed were and how we could bridge them.
Market Opportunity
Identifying Needs
A theme as complex and comprehensive as Sex Ed required a careful study of which were the basic features we would need to include in the app. At first we thought a search service would be the solution to the problem, but as we interviewed more parents and tweens we understood that dialogue between the two was needed and we could promote that in our app.
We decided to clarify our mission and design features that could propel us towards that mission:
Replacing the AWKWARD in Sex Ed with TRANSPARENCY, TRUTH and TOGETHERNESS for tweens (8-12y/o) and parents
With this in mind, we designed features such as the search engine for both tweens and parents along with games and a forum. We also started thinking about other features to include in the future, such as a Terms of Respect and Responsibility for tweens when they access the forum.
In our first pass, we talked about how to display content in a visual way using illustrations and icons. We also talked about maintaining privacy through the use of avatars instead of pictures. Furthermore we discussed about how to make the forum safe with medically accurate information and prevent users from disseminating information that might be medically inaccurate.
Afterwards we developed the first screens and quickly learned from feedback that it was too text heavy, especially for younger children, and that we needed to humanize it more. At this point we learned that parents needed to be an active part of the conversation. With this knowledge, we went on to produce more screens and reached the iteration below, with short videos for content and fun badges for course completion on the kids’ side and added the parents side as well. In addition, we added a parents's side, which came with shared games and a report card style profile for their kids.
We followed a similar process for the forum. We understood that being able to have discussions was important if we wanted to create a more humanized experience, but at the same time we had concerns for safety and the dissemination of medically accurate information. The proposed solution was to only enable discussion once a question had been answered by a verified health professional, and always display the question-answer thread together with the professional's certification to ensure accuracy. Another feature we added was to only enable discussion once the question has been answered, so once a tween sends in a question, it is first answered by a health professional and only then can other tweens comment.