Sassy
Preventing the spread of STIs amongst Young Adults in the UK.
Context
Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) can effect one's body seriously as untreated STIs can leads to cancer, HIV, organ damage and even death. In 2022, STI infection rates in England increased by 24% within a year, soaring above pre-pandemic levels. Despite free testing services from the NHS, there are challenges within individual and social behaviours resulting in record-high levels of STIs. The public services are out there. We now need behavioural changes that can fully utilise these services to create a safer environment for all.
Goal
This project aims to empower young female adults aged between 18 to 24 to take control of their sexual health and prevent the spread of STIs in the UK.
Outcome
"Sassy", an app that helps people achieve safer & better sexual health through the power of A.I.
Role
Role
​Service Designer
UI/UX Designer
Methods
User Interview, Data Analysis, App Wireframing & Design
Partner
SHL, Sexpression UK,
Prevent X, and FPA
Tutor
John Makepeace
Time
4 Months
Mar 2023 - Aug 2023
Approach
This is the final project of my time at Royal College of Art and I worked on this project with 2 other service design peers who all have interests in sexual health and wellbeing. We understand that communication with project partners is crucial in Service Design, so to visualise our Design Thinking and project process clearly, we used the Double Diamond framework to guide & illustrate our project. ​
Discover
Define
Develop
Deliver
Research
Design
Research
When we talk about STIs with friends and family, it can feel awkward due to its stigmatised nature. As this is sensitive topic, we made sure to get approval for the Ethical Risk Plan and consent from all our interviewees before any interviews took place.
Desk Research
We took sources new platforms, scientific reports and social media to first get an insight about the situation of STIs in UK. We found out that infection rates are still increasing due to these 4 main reasons.
Expert Interviews
We connected and interviewed 2 professionals to understand the types of STIs, existing problems within the industry, causes, and solutions.
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Scientist:
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STI infection is becoming more resistant even with the vast treatment available, and this is mainly caused by an increase of STI cases and not testing regularly.
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Doctor:
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NHS invested heavily in sexual health services, and changed the naming of STD (...disease) to STI in attempts to reduce stigma. However, STIs can lead to STDs if left untreated.
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Home and clinical testing is available for free, but 59% of Brits have never tested.​
Service Safari
As both experts mentioned the importance of testing, we ordered one of the free online test kits from our project partner Sexual Health London to understand and evaluate the process from a user's point of view.​​
Main takeaways:​
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Testing inconvenience: users often have a hard time finding testing services based on their location.
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Window periods: users are confused about when to test and infection time for STIs varies and can lead to false results.
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Lack of info on treatments: online tests may lead you to another professional if you are infected, but self research is required, and this information can be confusing.
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Targets existing users: designed for people who have a habit of testing regularly.
Survey
Along with testing, another point we were concerned about was the social stigma surrounding STIs and we questioned how does this impact people's sexual health. This survey from 510 respondents were all taken by people living in the UK.
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76.5% have heard about STI, but only 52.1% thought STIs are socially accepted.
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53.6% have asked their partners for results, the rest who didn't, felt it was unnecessary or they couldn't bring it up during conversations due to feelings like awkwardness.
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Most people tests for hygiene if they had a casual encounter or if they're feeling anxious due to symptoms.
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The social stigma prevents people from talking and exchanging results with their partners which may cause the spread of STI and burdens their own wellbeing.
User Interview
We interviewed 17 people from diverse demographic backgrounds, between the age of 18 to 50, and have lived in the UK for more than 5 years. The purpose of the in-depth 1-2-1 interview is to determine:
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The Cause to the spread of STI and the extent of social stigmatisation by examining people's knowledge and behaviour choices in certain situations.
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The Age & Gender Group that are the most sexually active and have the highest infection rate, which will help to define our target user later on.
Questionnaire
Consent Form
"Trust" is the main behaviour problem that causes the spread of STI. It is essentially a double edged sword:
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Over Trusting: happens when people are unaware of the risks of STI or they trust their partner's words without seeing evidence of test results. Over trusting a partner can lead to negating STI prevention methods such as using condoms and regular testing.
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Lack of Trust: happens most with young people and people who have hook ups. They would rather test after sex and get treatment if infected, than to ask their partner for results before or during sex, as this would ruin the mood. Lack of trust with a partner often means the person has more knowledge about STIs and prevention methods, which leads to regular testing.
People's preferences for relationship types vary across different stages of their lives. While people may lean towards short term relationships in their early 20s, their preferences can evolve as they age. From our interview, people in Early 20s~ Mid 20s pursues more short-term relationships and are more likely to change their partners frequently.
Whilst there are services from NHS to help treat and prevent STIs, we questioned why cases amongst young adults are high. Through desk research, we discovered that aside from having short-term relationships without prevention such as condoms, young people are more prone to infection due to biological reasons, exploration and curiosity and social influences.
Insights
Based on our research, we found 3 key areas that influences the rise of STI diagnosis.
1. Attitude & Behaviour
2. Learning & Sexual Health Education
3. Testing
Insight 1: Attitude & Behaviour
Young people's behaviour contributes to a high number STI diagnosis in the UK. Most of our interviewees and survey respondents understands condoms are for prevention of pregnancy, but they don't realise it could also prevent STI transmitted from vaginal and anal intercourse. Moreover, testing often happens when they experience symptoms, and so the habit of testing on a regular basis is currently only for a small number of people.
Insight 2: Learning & Knowledge
What's interesting is that STI diagnosis are most common amongst young adults, females, and LGBTQ+ community who are more likely to pursue short-term relationships.
As mentioned before with trust, it is also the case with believing in false information. Sexual health education is mandatory for UK students in Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2, but often it is not enough.
Insight 3: Testing
False knowledge can directly impact a person behaviour and attitude towards their sexual health. For example, condoms can prevent some STIs, but not for oral intercourse. Also, as some STIs are symptomless, this could lead to serious diseases if not tested.
HMW
How might we help young female adults who are looking for short-term relationships to gain STI knowledge and encourage them to have safer sex without sacrificing the fun?
Develop an interest for sexual health
Improve their knowledge of STI
Get to know their body better
Plan their own testing on a regular basis
Form healthy testing habits and influence others
Ideation
Our target user is young female adults who are biologically more prone to getting STI than other age groups and gender. With this, we first started brainstorming on Figjam with our insights whilst doing research on existing technology and services.
Desk Research
Concept Direction
To ensure people enjoy better sex, they need to understand their bodily needs and have confidence in themselves. From our research, we concluded that better awareness for STIs and regular testing habits can prevent the spread of STI and have better sexual health. As AI technology has been on the rise in recent years, we wanted to capitalise this, creating an AI expert to merge the two goals together and empower women to have safer & healthier sexual pleasure.
Sassy
We designed Sassy, a personal AI sex expert that aims improve one's health through regular STI testing. The app is designed to track sex and menstrual cycle and provide personalised tips on how the user can improve their sexual health.
Our ultimate goal with Sassy, is to provide a "safe & sexy" experience for women's sex life and at the same time reduce the cases of STIs in the UK.
Key features
Sassy has 2 main functions to improve the user's sexual health.
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The "Desire Discovery" function allows users to input their sexual preferences to allow Sassy to give suggestions new sexual activities and goals.
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The SAS Calendar tracks a woman's sex and menstrual cycle and uses AI to find the best STI Testing Dates. Based on the results, users are able to effortlessly book a STI test through the app.
Essentially, to achieve better sexual health, Sassy aims to maximise sexual pleasure for its users, which also acts as an incentive for users to learn about how to take care of their body and wellbeing better with the building the habit of testing regularly. Instead of testing when symptoms show, it is better to inform decisions to users before STI harms their health.
Validation
During our final weeks of the project, we tested our prototype app during the graduate show and received valuable feedback from visitors through an anonymous card box. We showcased an interactive mock-up on an touchpad, and detailed our research on posters. The board on the left, is a fun experience for visitors to create their own Sassy with cut outs, which mirrors how Sassy creates a sex personality for users in the app.
Feedback
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Many people were concerned about the safety and privacy of sharing their sex life data on an app and with the AI database.
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Most woman felt the menstrual tracking was unnecessary, as they are used to using other apps like Flo and Apple Health. However, they suggested, if we can link the data from two apps together, it would improve the overall user experience.
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They also felt that an added feature could be to see their partner's STI test results, that way they could avoid having awkward conversations.
Next Steps
To ensure users trusts our service and to create a safe space for women, our next steps would be focus on how we can improve data privacy.
Currently, we have submitted our research article on STI and young adults to FPA, which is UK's leading company on providing sexual health education resources to schools and organisations. We also worked with Sexpression:UK for expert interviews. Moreover, we recieved feedback during the project from meetings with SHL and Prevent X, the largest test provider and online testing services in the UK. To note, SHL was keen on our idea, and was willing to discuss funding on developing the app, but due to cost cuts from UK government, this never came to action.
Key Learnings
Consent
This project has taught me the importance of consent and measuring ethical risks when researching a sensitive topic. During interviews, but tried to connect with our participants first to ease the tension and create safe environment for them. This helped them to open up when sharing their stories. ​
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Partner
Sexual health was an area that we weren't familiar in, and finding a project partner was extremely difficult as it took us one month to connect with FPA, three months to meet with SHL. The key takeaway here is to participate in events to connect with people in person, which may have shorten the process.
