How to design products and services around taboo topics
Last month we explored tips and tricks that our design team uses to authentically engage with young people during design research.
After you have explored, defined, and tested your assumptions in partnership with your participants, it’s time to build products or services to meet their needs! Since our founding in 2016, YLabs has built a wide array of products and services that touch on taboo topics, including a mobile and web app that helps young people in Rwanda explore questions about sex, relationships, and contraception through narrative storylines; a service design model in Ghana that connects girls and young women to safe abortion care; and a media campaign in Kenya that promotes HIV self-testing among high-risk young men.
Here are some principles that we incorporate into our design process in order to ensure that young people who use our products or services don’t put themselves at social risk in doing so.
Design for Privacy
When designing around taboo topics, prioritize building privacy protection into your products. “In Rwanda, we found that young people don’t want to go to health clinics to get free contraception because they don’t want to answer personal questions in a public place,” said Senior Designer Caroline Wong. “Which is understandable! Just imagine yourself are a teenager, standing at a counter crowded with nosey neighbors, and being asked about your sex life. No thank you!”
Because of this desire for privacy, we worked with young people in Rwanda to co-design a product that allows them to answer sensitive but medically relevant questions online instead of in a crowded clinic. Thanks to support from The Dave and Lucile Packard Foundation and the collaboration of over 1000 young Rwandans, young people can use the CyberRwanda mobile app to browse health products, choose what is right for them, and place an order to be discreetly picked up at a local pharmacy.
When designing a digital product, remember that people are wary of giving away personal information online, especially about socially stigmatized behaviors like sex or contraceptive use. “Consider whether or not you really need to collect personally identifiable information like names or gender,” said Wong. “Decide what information is absolutely critical, and then be upfront with the users about how this information will be used.”
Normalize asking questions
The nature of taboo topics means that discussing them openly is often stigmatized. This lack of dialogue and space to explore can make people think, incorrectly, that they are the only ones who have questions or are curious. Through our design, we have the chance to reassure users that their questions are normal.
“In Rwanda, typical sex education material is often prescriptive,” said Wong. “It tells you what to do and what not to do without offering space for discussion. In our projects, we have the chance to use language and visual designs that empathize and honor young people’s emotions like fear, embarrassment, discomfort, and curiosity.” In CyberRwanda, a major component of the mobile and web apps is a FAQ section that normalizes and encourages asking questions.
Use ‘acceptable’ topics to increase sustainability
Some topics are more culturally acceptable than others - use this to your advantage! An objective of your design research should be to understand which topics are more acceptable in order to build a product or service that young people will ultimately be comfortable using and that parents or members of the community will be comfortable approving. This will help to ensure the sustainability and acceptability of your product.
For example, we have found that talking about sex, contraception, and reproductive health with young people can be taboo, but talking about creating a bright future is not. When working with young men to understand barriers to HIV self-testing, we found that adding employment training to a reproductive health program could increase its acceptability. After all, young people often are more concerned with their day to day successes than with their long-term health -- and it’s less socially taboo to engage with materials and events about employment rather than HIV.
Our Warrior Health project combined employment skills training and mental health care with information and HIV self-testing and sexual and reproductive health to address the wide spectrum of their needs.
Make sure your designs can be hidden in plain sight
When designing around a taboo topic, make sure that your designs can be hidden in plain sight by using discreet messaging and branding. When working on a project aimed at preventing unsafe abortion in sub-Saharan Africa, our design team created posters to increase awareness of peer-led support groups with older girls to talk about sex, relationships, and reproductive health. These support groups were instrumental in linking younger girls to safe abortion services if needed - but how to get the word out about such a stigmatized topic without upsetting parents?
To make sure you get your messaging right, test the content as a prototype before designing a full campaign around it to make sure you are safeguarding everyone involved. “Originally, one of our promotional flyers said, ‘We keep your stories confidential to encourage privacy,’ said Lacorazza. “During live prototyping, a parent interpreted this as keeping secrets about their child from them, and they got upset. This caused us to change the wording to, ‘We won’t gossip about your stories’ and it became acceptable to parents, while still signaling to girls that this was a safe space where they could ask real questions about sex and abortion without fear.”
Use storytelling to get your message across
Young people have questions about sex, relationships, and safe abortion, but it may be awkward for them to ask about these topics... So why not weave the information into engaging storylines? Who isn’t drawn into sensational stories about love, betrayal, and murder - so why not use the natural fascination with drama to get your message across?
"We created a graphic novel with telenovela-inspired storylines that included information about what to do if you got pregnant. A hotline number was embedded in the graphic novel where girls could ask questions about their bodies,” said Lacorazza.
The additional benefit of using storytelling is that it provides additional cover for your users. Imagine the difference between your friends seeing you reading a comic book that just happens to cover health topics, vs a medical pamphlet called ‘Menstruation and Your Changing Body...’
Working with young people to build products and services that will measurably and meaningfully improve their lives comes with great responsibility. To do so safely, we suggest remembering to design for privacy, inviting questions, using ‘acceptable’ topics, using discreet messaging and branding, using storytelling to create a more cherished product.
These are just a few of the tips and tricks that our design team has used in our projects around the world. To find out more about our project work or to share your own experiences - get in touch!
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