Scope

Master’s Capstone
5 months

Team

Alissa Rubin
Amrita Chatterji
Yang Qian
Ridhi Brahmwar

Key Skills

UX Research
Service Design
Content Writing + Editing
Game Design + Prototyping
Usability Testing

“ I want to do a project about sex-ed. ”

This is how the founders of Knotty came together—united by a somewhat unusual interest in improving the experience of sex-education.

Why sex-ed?

As four women from three very different countries—India, China, and the United States—we had a range of personal experiences with sex-ed while growing up. And yet in many ways our experiences were disappointingly familiar: confusion, discomfort, and dissatisfaction with the lessons we received in school and at home; and of course, some amount of baggage in the form of shame.

Our Solution

We realized parents and adults in general need to be more comfortable having conversations about sexuality, in order to better address these topics for children and teens growing up today.

To facilitate these conversations, we developed a two-part solution for adults: the Knotty Talk Game and Get Knotty Quiz are the main components of a service that helps break down the sexuality taboo, and encourages conversations in fun and informative ways. With them, it's easy to talk about sex!

But let’s talk more about how we arrived at this intervention!

Determining Scope

Sex-ed is a broad topic addressed in very different ways from country to country, as well as from school to school and family to family. For this design topic, we wanted to work within our community, so we limited the scope to California and began researching.

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We spent two weeks learning about our topic, conducting secondary research and interviews. We came together every few days to share and synthesize, then refocus based on our learnings and insights.

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General sub-topics began to emerge as we mapped the ecosystem of the education California’s kids are receiving. We soon had a sense of the messy overlapping areas from which children learn about relationships, biology, and sexuality. The most consistent leverage point in the system is parents (and other legal guardians), who are able to influence so many areas tangential to kids’ lives, and of course have the most direct access to the kids themselves.

Parents are perceived as the major obstacle to sex-ed, but are overwhelmingly in favor of it.

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I focused my research on policy and sex-ed educators, and spoke to a former Planned Parenthood sexuality educator, “Q”. From speaking with him, I learned ways to ease having difficult conversations with parents about their children’s need for comprehensive sexuality-ed. Q also spoke about the need to educate parents themselves, who often have never gotten accurate information on these topics. This emphasis was a major factor in our increasing focus on parents as a crucial leverage point in children’s sex-ed ecosystem.

We learned that the problem hinges on a culture of silence.

Key Insights

• parents are a central hub in the sex-ed ecosystem
  

• adults are not comfortable with these topics simply because they are adults
  

• children need an ongoing conversation, not just a few hours of medical lectures
  

• personal support of sex-ed does not equal open advocacy for it

• the social taboo prevents honest conversations and allows sex-phobia to dominate the conversation
  

• anonymous spaces are important but don’t increase comfort having real-life conversations about sexuality topics
  

• people are eager to share when they have an excuse to, such as during Pride or while playing party games

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From our research, it was clear there was an opportunity to address adults directly as a way to create a healthier, sex-positive environment for children. So often, the resources we saw available to adults were focused on how parents can broach conversations with their kids about biology and sex, or were designed to titillate and create a sexual environment. We realized there was a real need for adults to have space for self-discovery of these topics, without inherently sexualizing the discussion. This is often an unfamiliar idea in the United States, where so many topics become taboo because they indirectly relate to sex.

Using the Pace Layering model of complex systems as a jumping-off point, we designed a strategy for shifting the cultural taboo. Our intervention would focus on encouraging conversations about sexuality, to disrupt our cultural habits. We would develop a solution that teaches adults about different aspects of sexuality and its impact on daily life, and helps them build comfort with having these conversations.

Small and fast change to create deep and lasting impact.

prototyping and iterating

At this point, we shared our insights and design direction with advisors in the design world and with local businesses focused on the sexuality market. Our guiding principles became: our intervention should be non-judgmental, contain humor, encourage in-person conversations, and respect the awkwardness.

We quickly developed and tested an activity called O.Monster to get conversations flowing.

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The O.Monster helped us validate some of our design principles, earlier learnings, and assumptions: having people think of their sexuality as a character (in this case, the monster they drew) that they can converse with made it easier to talk about their sexuality and identity with others.

People need space to introspect on aspects of sexuality and identity before being able to share with others.

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We built metrics into our activity, to gauge testers’ comfort level before and after participating. We also conducted exit interviews. Overall, our metrics showed increased comfort after participating, and testers unanimously responded that the activity taught them something new and was a positive experience.

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Synthesizing the findings from interviews and O.Monster testing, we developed archetypes of our potential audience. Rather than building personas from demographic information, we found it useful to think in terms of people’s comfort levels and needs around exploring sexual identity. These fall on a spectrum, and so our archetypes are unique in that people have the ability to progress along this spectrum. We decided to focus our intervention on three primary user archetypes.

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These archetypes helped focus the goal of our intervention, which would actually be to shift people along the spectrum toward being an advocate for sex-positivity.

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The Knotty Talk Game and Get Knotty Quiz help break down the sexuality taboo, and encourage conversations in fun and informative ways.

The two parts of the intervention work in tandem to address different aspects of becoming comfortable with these conversations, and are targeted to specific journeys along the comfort spectrum. They are designed to play off of and support each other, but work individually as well.

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The Get Knotty self-reflective quiz grew out of our original O.Monster concept in order to create a space for people to self-reflect and consider their sexuality as an important part of their identity.

The quiz has both short and long-form prompts that focus on inclusive identities, positivity, and many different aspects of sexuality. I took the lead in developing and writing the quiz prompts after conversations with sex-educators and further research into sex-positive mental health resources.

The quiz is responsive to some previous answers and specifically targets “The Conflicted” archetypes. It is not designed to be “scored,” but provides the person taking it a space for thoughtful reflection. The answers are then stored, and later emailed to the person with a delay of several weeks or months, and a prompt to retake the quiz. The person can retake the quiz at any point and compare their answers to see what changes in their thinking have occurred. In the ideal final form, NLP software would assess quiz responses to be able to detect positive versus negative statements, which could indicate a person’s progress toward a more healthy relationship with their sexuality.

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The Knotty Talk game was built over many iterations of game testing. Each round provided useful insights and allowed us to rethink and fine-tune all the game dynamics, as well as refine the visual design and the written content.

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Ideally, the game is played with friends so that players are in a comfortable social environment. It is designed to ease people into non-judgmental conversation about many different aspects of sexuality, and open up the floor for sharing opinions and experiences. We believe that the more people are able to see the diversity of human sexuality, the more we can understand the need for comprehensive sexuality education, because of the varying forms sexuality takes and the divergent ways it impacts our lives.

But the work doesn’t end there…

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From the beginning of our design process, we considered what metrics would best indicate progress toward our goal of encouraging sex-positive conversations. Part of designing this intervention was designing effective ways to measure its impact.

How do we know if it works?

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To do this impact measurement, we ended up building our own “Comfort Index” to measure people’s feelings toward different aspects of sexuality. This index was based off of a statistically validated questionnaire (the MMCS1: Multidimensional Measurement of Comfort with Sexuality form), but adapted for usage with our game. We administered our Comfort Index to individuals before and after they played the Knotty Talk game, and saw a 57% increase in neutral-positive responses.

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Throughout the design process, we mapped the competitive landscape to determine our opportunity area, define our brand and service strategy, and understand our position in the market.

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Unlike many other ‘sexy’ games in this space, the Knotty Talk game it is not meant to be primarily educational, nor create a sexually charged atmosphere. Some play-tester groups included couples in order to test the dynamic created in the game by this relationship, but the primary usage is not to help couples connect sexually.

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One of my biggest takeaways from this project was learning to be more comfortable with the tension between depth and breadth in developing an intervention. As we began to focus down on our research and considered a more targeted and specific audience, such as children with disabilities, we struggled with feeling like we wanted our impact to reach as many kids or families as possible—but this type of broad impact (unless you have endless time and budget) is likely to come at the expense of depth or focused impact. And when we were considering broad interventions, we sometimes felt like we were sacrificing deep impact that we could have in a more focused population, like a single school. This tension stayed without us throughout the development of our solution.

When we were considering broad interventions designed for many people, we felt like we were sacrificing more substantial impact that we could have in a smaller focused population.

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Although it was frustrating wanting to have it both ways, I believe this conflict is an important driver that indicates our depth of conviction in the project and a continued dedication to creating a powerful and thoughtful intervention. It was also a great demonstration of the fact that at some point, you simply have to make difficult design choices.

There are countless stories in the design community about the perils of designing for an ‘average’ (one that often doesn’t really represent anybody), as well as the problems with designing only for a limited set of people, to the exclusion of others. As designers we often build personas to try to find a middle ground between these opposite poles—to varying levels of success. I think another benefit of this tension between broad impact for many, or deep impact for a few, was that it helped us constantly question who our target community consists of, who was most in need, how our intervention might be extended outward or focused downward, and how impact might spread from our intervention. Overall, regularly returning to these questions strengthened our design process and lead to greater alignment within our team.

1. Manufacture the game

2. Develop strategic partnerships

3. Expansion sets

Our next steps with this project would be to raise funds in order to manufacture the Knotty Talk game. With revenue from this game, we would want to code the quiz and do NLP analysis on responses. We also would like to do a more rigid statistical validation and administration of our Comfort Index, in order to gather high-quality metrics and use them to keep improving our products.

We would develop strategic partnerships with for- and non-profit companies in the industry, to help distribute our services and increase brand recognition.

Finally, we want to build out niche expansion sets of cards for the game. These would increase the inclusivity of the game by creating space for topics that are unique for different populations—different ages and stages of life, different regions and social backgrounds, LGBTQ+, etc. Although we want these different topics to be highlighted for every player to grow their awareness, expansion sets can delve more deeply into personally relevant discussions for different groups that would not resonate with everyone.