Let’s Talk About (Safe) Sex, Baby!
The College Edition
PROCESS MANUAL 1
What’s Inside? 02
Project Brief
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Research
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Concept Development
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IDEO Method Cards
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Solution
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Next Steps
Project Brief
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Objective The objective of Let’s Talk About (Safe) Sex, Baby! is bright and colorful booklet that aims to reduce the stigma surrounding choosing to be sexually active in college and reminding UC Davis students to practice safe sex by promoting them to communicate with their partner(s) and utilize the resources around them if they are thinking about having sex and have questions or are having sex and have questions.
Mission Statement Let’s Talk About (Safe) Sex, Baby! is a booklet written by a student for students, in a college narrative, to communicate and remind UC Davis students what safe sex practices are and what resources around the UC Davis campus are available to help them through their sexual experiences.
Audience The target audience for Let’s Talk About Safe Sex, Baby! is UC Davis students who may or may not be sexually active.
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Research
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Brainstorming & Mind Map Initially, I did not know what I wanted to create to educate the public about public health, safety, and education. I started off with completely different topics, but ended up choosing the topic of safe sex as it is an important public health, safety, and education topic to discuss after brainstorming with my class.
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“You shouldn’t have to go to a doctor to get the information. Looking the information up online doesn’t tell you everything you need to know in a concise manner. People don’t want to search for everything. They want to have it all in one place. I want to know what types of birth control there is, how much it costs generally, and the possible side effects that come with that type of birth control generally.”
Primary Research To get a better idea of what information people want to know about birth control, I decided to start by doing some primary research by asking someone who has been considering going on birth control pill for a while now, but does not know a lot about birth control herself. From there, I had a hunch to create something that would display all the information you would need to know about each respective birth control method that is out there.
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Secondary Research To get a feel of how I wanted to create something that would educate the public about safe sex methods, I researched what already has been done and preexists that educates the public about birth control. I found that Bedsider.com did the best at displaying birth control methods in a visually appealing way but it was a bit too dense in information and the information was not laid out in the best way. I decided that perhaps if it was displayed in a way like ballot.fyi, a website that displayed information about California propositions in a visual appealing way in layman’s terms, that this may be my solution. 7
Concept & Development
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Initial Sketches From my mind map, I had a hunch that the problem with college students not practicing safe sex was solely derived from not understanding what birth control is and what methods are out there. Here, I began sketching wireframes of potential website formats I could create to provide information about birth control.
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Prototype 1 My target audience overwhelmingly voted that they wanted to learn about safe sex practices and birth control methods via a website after conducting a survey. Therefore, I decided to do a quick mockup of a website for a prototype 1. I aimed to make it colorful and fun with bright images and illustrations, and I attempted to condense information about birth control methods as straightforward in layman’s term as possible without leaving any important information out.
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Feedback It was brought to my attention that a website format to educate the public about safe sex may not be the correct format I wanted to go about. It was also brought up to me that people thought the information was too text heavy even with simplification. Lastly, it was brought up to me that making a website to educate the public about safe sex and only really describing birth control methods on it would create assumptions that using birth control is the only component in practicing safe sex. 11
IDEO Method Cards
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Method Cards My first prototype was not working out as I had anticipated so I started to consider how I could reframe and repackage my idea to all the feedback I was given and come up with a better potential solution to promote talking about safe sex practices. To help me with my research and design process, I utilized an IDEO Method Card from each of the four main categories of the IDEO Method Cards: LEARN, LOOK, ASK, TRY. These Methods aided me incredibly in the discovery of what would be my solution to educate UC Davis students about safe sex effectively. 13
Learn To help with my research and design process, I chose to create character profiles based on my target audience. I observed real people to develop these character profiles to represent some archetypes, behaviors, and lifestyles to any identify patterns and insights to brings typical readers to life and communicate values of different concepts to various target groups. The character profiles based on real people I have created share same values with the exception of gender. This gave me insight that it is possible to create a resource that describes safe sex practices across genders. 14
Look I chose to use my personal inventory of peers around me who are my target audience to review UC Davis’s preexisting booklet on safe sex and highlight what was important to them. This method was useful for me because it revealed people’s activities, perceptions, and values as well as patterns among them to as what information about safe sex was important to them. I documented these sections as things people identified as important to them to include in my redesign of the booklet. 15
Ask To gain further insight as to what people thought about safe sex, I conducted a Google Forms survey to enlist my target audience’s participation to understand better the issue of safe sex at hand and how they would learn about safe sex. Conducting this survey helped me make a conclusion that the issue was not that people did not know how to practice safe sex or that people do not know how to find specific information regarding birth control methods, but there seems to be a disconnect in communicating about practicing safe sex with a partner(s). 16
Try To help empathize with my target audience and to evaluate my proposed designs, I made a quick prototype of my concept of a safe sex education website focusing on birth control to help evaluate my proposed design by giving my audience a rough visual of my intended design, allowing my target audience to evaluate its layout. This process helped reveal unanticipated issues like the information is still too text heavy, people would want to see more visuals, and people wanted to see a social media style component to this project. This process helped me realize that I needed to take a step back and evaluate and re-evaluate my design ideas. 17
Solution
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Reframe I took a step back and took some time to think about what was actually the correct and best way to convey safe sex practices and what way was the best way, I decided I needed to focus in on a specific audience. With this mindset, I approach the UC Davis Love Lab in the UC Davis Student Health and Wellness Center to see what materials UC Davis was providing as resources for their students for inspiration. In the piles of unorganized materials, I rediscovered a safe sex booklet amongst all the materials regarding safe sex topics scattered around the UC Davis Love Lab that I have received before but forgot about from a mandatory sex education orientation I attended as a UC Davis transfer. This booklet became a point of interest to me as I saw that this booklet had great information to consider and think about, but was just unattractive and outdated in its design and the amount of information being conveyed, making it uninviting to read. To learn more about the booklet, I asked to speak with a Health Education and Promotion educator to see if they were working on any kind of redesign for this booklet. 19
Repackage The Health Education and Promotion educator at the UC Davis Student Health and Wellness Center interview let me know that the UC Davis Health Education and Promotion was actually working on redesigning the safe sex booklet and was able to give me tons of advice and perspective on what was the main issues college students sought help for in terms of practicing safe sex and regarding safe sex. My conversation with the Health Education and Promotion educator became all about the preexisting safe sex booklet and we brainstormed a hunch that I had a hunch that it is not that college students do not know how to practice safe sex per say or how to seek out information to know how to practice safe sex, but it is that there is a stigma regarding talking about sex. Many college students wait until after after having sex to communicate about sex with their partners. From this conversation with the UC Davis Health, Education, and Promotion educator, I began reframing and repackaging my own concept of a resource in a college student narrative with a fun and playful twist for UC Davis students to refer to in regards to safe sex practices. 20
Let’s Talk About (Safe) Sex, Baby! From the hunch developed by the conversation with the UC Davis Health Education and Promotion educator, I decided to reimagine the design and layout of the preexisting safe sex booklet to a more attractive and appealing through bright and fun colors and by describing safe sex practices in a college narrative. I also implemented memes because memes have become a primary way of communicating ideas in the UC Davis community supported by the fact that there is an actively used UC Davis meme sharing Facebook page. The content was rewritten and/or condensed to be more straightforward so that the new booklet would be a quicker and better read, since college students do not have a lot of time, energy, or attention span to read and make sense of the preexisting safe sex booklet UC Davis has created. The goal of this new trendy booklet is to encouraging thought and conversation to be made between sexual partner(s) in a college setting through a college student’s narrative. 21
Next Steps
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Design The next steps for Let’s Talk About (Safe) Sex, Baby! would be to perhaps create an engaging icon as a component of the logo for the booklet as the current logo is composed of typography only. Creeps would have to be implemented in the printing process for optimal look and feel of flipping through the booklet as the booklet is printed and binded in a 2-up saddle stitch. Implementing common sayings of what students around UC Davis think safe sex is and means would add great value to the overall booklet as it is written in and for the college narrative. A more modern meme style was considered, but classic meme style was chosen as the look of a classic meme was more recognizable and the overall look of a classic meme
fit better with the look of the booklet. Respective consent and copyrights for the memes and pictures implemented and used in the booklet would need to be obtained. Higher quality photos for memes would also need to be found for better quality pictures. A Proxima Nova typeface version of the booklet may be implemented for the UC Davis to distribute, however, after conducting a typeface study, it is recommended to keep the book in Avant Garde as UC Davis students, the target audience, preferred the typeface more because it was more young, trendy, and relevant.
User Testing Further user testing of the booklet would be conducted to see if the target audience would be receptive of learning about safe sex in a booklet format. To do this, several copies of the booklet would be distributed out in popular student waiting and study areas to see if people would pick it up and read it while they rest or wait for their next class.
Format A social media page, website, and/ or signage in the UC Davis Student Health and Wellness Center could be implemented using based of the booklet could be made to further get the message to practice safe sex through communication. 23
Sarah Wang | DES 159 | Let’s Talk About (Safe) Sex, Baby! | Spring 2017 25