Meta

Co-designing with teens and guardians for digital wellbeing

Smart Design partnered with Meta to understand how to address digital safety and privacy for teens on their platforms. We developed a global co-design program, directly engaging teens and guardians across 5 countries, along with consultations with policymakers and academics. Our insights directly informed the development of Meta's Family Center and Education Hub which provide families with tools and resources that support their teen’s online experience.

My role as the Design Lead included:

  • Designing all materials used in remote co-design sessions

  • Illustrating sacrificial UX concepts

  • Designing presentations to creatively communicate our process and findings

  • Leading the visual storytelling and design of a report and interactive web page published by TTC Labs

  • Supporting secondary research, co-design moderation, and research synthesis

Project Type

Strategy
Visual Design
UX/UI Design

Strategy
Visual Design
UX Design

Team

Project Director
Strategy Lead
Design Lead (me)
UX Designer
Program Manager

Services & Methods

User Interview, Co-design, Concept Testing, User Persona, Research Toolkit, Report Design, Web Design

Timeline

2021 - 2022
(40+ weeks)

The challenge

Designing digital products for young people presents unique challenges because they have distinct, yet rapidly-evolving needs, goals and motivations. In addition, there has been growing regulatory and media scrutiny highlighting key concerns about teen wellbeing on social platforms, including mental health impacts, cyberbullying, harmful content exposure, and parental oversight.

In order to build the right social media product for teens and guardians, Meta partnered with Smart Design to establish a product development process that focused on designing with people, rather than just for them

Our co-design approach

Our approach employed co-design, a participatory research method that directly engages users in the design process. It focuses on hands-on creative activities as a tool to understand underlying needs and desires as well as develop their own ideas.

We conducted co-design with teens and guardians in the US, UK, Ireland, Brazil, and Japan to understand the similarities and differences of their needs and contexts. We also ran expert consultation sessions with international policy makers, academics, and children's rights advocates to include their perspectives into our recommendations.

Designing engaging activities for teens and guardians

The co-design sessions were conducted virtually using a combination of Zoom and Miro 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 guardian's desire to keep their teen safe and a teen's need for autonomy and freedom to explore.

Examples:

In an activity called "My Education Mood Board" we asked groups of guardians to collaboratively create an educational experience that would teach them about social media related topics they wished they knew more about.

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.

We presented participants with sacrificial concepts to gather feedback and opportunities for improvement. These early product concepts were illustrated intentionally vague and under-developed to leave space for people to build upon them.

Our learnings informed new features and products for Meta

In March 2022, Meta launched Family Center, a new place for parents and guardians to access supervision tools and resources that support their teen’s online experience.

By listening to teens and guardians we learned about the kinds of customizable tools necessary for teens to adapt and thrive. These insights helped to inform a new suite of features on Family Center that give guardians and teens more flexibility, including adaptable limits that can account for situational context like weekends and vacations.

Meta also launched Education Hub, where guardians can access helpful resources from experts and learn what supervision tools are available.

We learned that lack of knowledge amongst guardians is one of the biggest barriers to online supervision. Guardians often struggle to keep up with new technologies, and feel they lack the context to understand their teens' online experiences. Leveraging ideas from co-design, Education Hub provides resources from experts including tips on how to have meaningful conversations about social media with your teen.

We built trust by engaging users and experts throughout the process

"It is really encouraging to know that Meta has been listening to young people and their parents and creating tools that encourage timely conversations. At Parent Zone, we know how difficult it can be for parents when they feel locked out of their children’s digital worlds. With these new tools, we are seeing a shift to greater partnership between families and platforms and that is an incredibly positive step."

Vicki Shotbolt

CEO and Founder, Parent Zone

"It is really encouraging to know that Meta has been listening to young people and their parents and creating tools that encourage timely conversations. At Parent Zone, we know how difficult it can be for parents when they feel locked out of their children’s digital worlds. With these new tools, we are seeing a shift to greater partnership between families and platforms and that is an incredibly positive step."

Vicki Shotbolt

CEO and Founder, Parent Zone

"It is really encouraging to know that Meta has been listening to young people and their parents and creating tools that encourage timely conversations. At Parent Zone, we know how difficult it can be for parents when they feel locked out of their children’s digital worlds. With these new tools, we are seeing a shift to greater partnership between families and platforms and that is an incredibly positive step."

Vicki Shotbolt

CEO and Founder, Parent Zone

"The co-design process has clearly shown that teens like to be able to call on their parents for support and guidance, but often don’t know where or how to begin. By proposing parental supervision tools across apps, Meta will help overcome this hurdle. Especially since the tools are unobtrusive, respectful of privacy, and offer the ideal training wheels for younger teens building their competence and confidence in the online social environment."

Janice Richardson

International Advisor, Insights SA

"The co-design process has clearly shown that teens like to be able to call on their parents for support and guidance, but often don’t know where or how to begin. By proposing parental supervision tools across apps, Meta will help overcome this hurdle. Especially since the tools are unobtrusive, respectful of privacy, and offer the ideal training wheels for younger teens building their competence and confidence in the online social environment."

Janice Richardson

International Advisor, Insights SA

"The co-design process has clearly shown that teens like to be able to call on their parents for support and guidance, but often don’t know where or how to begin. By proposing parental supervision tools across apps, Meta will help overcome this hurdle. Especially since the tools are unobtrusive, respectful of privacy, and offer the ideal training wheels for younger teens building their competence and confidence in the online social environment."

Janice Richardson

International Advisor, Insights SA

Our co-design approach had lasting impacts on Meta's product development process

Following the success of our co-design program in five countries, we delivered an internal co-design toolkit that product teams at Meta can use to replicate our methodology for other topics around wellbeing. The Meta team continued our program in Australia, India, Mexico, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire, and have since employed co-design in other research initiatives.

By the end of 2022, Meta had engaged:

"This co-design initiative helped our team empathize with teens and guardians globally so as to better understand their needs as we developed Family Center for Instagram in 2022. This research enabled a mindset shift towards facilitating teen and parent communication. Insights from this research will continue to be valuable for future-facing work on the design of family-oriented surfaces at Meta"

Ryan Kwok

Product Lead, Meta

"This co-design initiative helped our team empathize with teens and guardians globally so as to better understand their needs as we developed Family Center for Instagram in 2022. This research enabled a mindset shift towards facilitating teen and parent communication. Insights from this research will continue to be valuable for future-facing work on the design of family-oriented surfaces at Meta"

Ryan Kwok

Product Lead, Meta

"This co-design initiative helped our team empathize with teens and guardians globally so as to better understand their needs as we developed Family Center for Instagram in 2022. This research enabled a mindset shift towards facilitating teen and parent communication. Insights from this research will continue to be valuable for future-facing work on the design of family-oriented surfaces at Meta"

Ryan Kwok

Product Lead, Meta

Sharing our learnings with the world

Together with Meta and TTC Labs, we published a report in December 2022 to share our methodologies, insights, and future-facing design considerations with the broader community. As the Design Lead, I oversaw the visual storytelling, visual assets, and the layout of the report.

View report

View report

View report

The report was accompanied by an interactive web page, where I collaborated with a web developer and a visual design intern to make our story come to life with illustrations and scroll animations.

View visual explainer

View visual explainer

View visual explainer

If you'd like to learn more about this project, or hear about my other projects that are under NDA, let's chat!

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