Co-designing with teens for digital well-being
Smart Design partnered with Meta to understand how to address digital safety and privacy for teens on their platforms.
Working on this long-term engagement with Meta allowed us to collaborate directly with young people from around the world and understand their distinct, yet rapidly-evolving needs and motivations around digital safety and privacy.
As the strategy lead, I designed and conducted co-design sessions with teens and guardians in the US and UK, and oversaw moderation of similar sessions in Brazil and Japan. We took what we learned to publish insights and actionable opportunities for Meta and other digital product makers to ensure digital products and features meet the needs of young people.
Throughout the project, I also ran expert consultation sessions with international policy makers, academics, and children's rights advocates to include their perspectives into our recommendations. In the end, I was able to co-author a report of our findings and recommendations, which was published on the TTC labs website.
Client | Meta
Deliverables
The output of our research and synthesis included:
Report featuring frameworks and insights on teen safety and supervision and opportunities for product makers
Internal co-design toolkit that product teams at Meta can use to replicate our co-design methodology for other topics around wellbeing
Visual explainer for the TTC Labs website that explains our work in a simple, visual way (to be published)
Team
Creative director
Strategy lead (me)
Communication designer
UX designer
Co-moderators (Japan and Brazil)
Program manger
Engaging teens around the world
Our research took place over four loops of co-design in the US, UK, Brazil and Japan. Co-design is a qualitative and participatory method that actively engages people who use different products, in our case digital services. We invited guardians, teens, and experts from government, academia and civil society to be involved. Co-design focuses on hands-on prototyping and activities at interactive workshops, either virtually or in-person.
In each country, we conducted between 4 and 6 remote co-design sessions, each bringing together a group of 3 and 4 teens or guardians. We recruited teens and guardians as participants through both a local market research agency and nominations from civil society organizations that regularly work with young people. We used a cohort-based approach to ensure comfortable environments for participants to open up about shared experiences.
For the 90-minute sessions, we used a combination of Zoom to video chat and Miro, an online collaboration tool, to show stimuli and run interactive activities. All activities were designed to be mobile-friendly to be inclusive of people with limited access to technology.
The research activities we developed were designed to reveal important tensions between a guardians desire to keep their teen safe and a teens need for autonomy and freedom to explore. For instance, our Would You Rather activity encouraged teens to open up about their needs around having flexible screen time settings that took their social needs into account. These insights informed a new suite of features on Meta’s Family Center that give parents and teens more flexibility. These include adaptable limits that can account for situational context like weekends and vacations and the ability to schedule social media breaks for times when it is more likely to interfere with responsibilities such as school, homework, or sleep.
We played a game of Would You Rather, asking teens to deliberate between two extreme and opposing scenarios to reveal moderate solutions that were satisfying to them.
In an activity called In an activity called My Education Mood Board we asked groups of guardians to collaboratively create an educational experience that would teach them about the social media related topics they wished they knew more about.
There are no one-size-fits-all solutions.
Every family is unique and the path to digital autonomy for teens is not linear. From our conversations and co-design with teens and guardians, we explored the various paths to teens taking ownership of their digital experience, and how it is often not a straight line. Generally speaking, as teens grow and mature they become more trusted to handle situations on their own. Over time, guardians do less rule-setting and monitoring and move into phases where their teens are acting more autonomously online.
However, teens are in a state of flux – constantly learning new things and making mistakes – and may need more or less support at different times. While autonomy is the ultimate goal, rules change depending on whether the guardian senses their teen is capable of acting responsibly. Supervision tools must account for this ebb and flow, providing solutions for guardians and teens in any stage of development.
Sharing our learnings with the world
Our insights informed the launch of two new Meta surfaces Family Center and Education Hub which provide families with tools and resources that support their teen’s online experience, including new features that provide parents with insights that can support targeted conversations and open dialogue around social media.
Read more about the project and download the report here.
