Talk to a Sexpert

Hookup (Now Juicebox) is a sex education website helping teens connect more accessible information about safe sex and healthy relationships. 

After winning 3rd place at Startup Weekend EDU in San Francisco, we stuck as a team and successfully launched a beta test at the University of Tennessee Knoxville Sex Week in May 2015 and during the 4.0 Launch program in New Orleans.

Hookup eventually pivoted to an SMS text-based AI bot called Slutbot.

About Project:

Client: Hookup
Team: Designer, Founder, Engineer
Year: 2015
Services: Product, Branding
Recognition: 3rd Place, Startup Weekend EDU

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Details

Role
My role the main designer for UX+UI on the web app, marketing, the landing pages, pitch decks, and social media kits. While being the user experience designer, I helped in the user research at the beginning and worked with a dev to finalize the product with two main features. Share Your Story & Ask a Sexpert.

Problem
There isn’t a place for teens to get sex education in a fun way. Sex ed in schools is outdated and in some states, sex ed doesn’t exist.

Current chats arent 24/7, Q&A forums take too long, sex ed is currently boring, sex ed in schools aren’t as informative when ppl have questions, Google is an unreliable trusted source. Workshops offered by schools don’t happen enough, finding a community of sexperts that go with a specific topic is difficult.

Solution
A sex ed-focused app and social network for today’s under-25. The place to ask their burning questions about sex and relationships. The web app offers two features: Ask a Sexpert, which allows users to write anonymous questions and receive answers from experts who work at organizations such as Planned Parenthood in real-time, and Share Your Story, an also-anonymous forum-type feature for people to share their sexual experiences.

Timeline

1. During Startup Weekend EDU, worked with 1 dev and 1 business person to start a team about this idea.
2. Did a quick mockup to see if the idea was of interest.
   
3. Went out to the local malls to talk to teens about this idea with sketches and mockups to see where improvements could be. Spoke to some teens for user research.
   
4. After Startup Weekend EDU, doubled down on branding for Hookup (did a quick brainstorming and workshop with the founder to come up with the foundation of product and tone)
   
5. Worked on beta for college audiences while gathering ux research. Taught the founder how to do the process for when she went out to targeted groups and meetings.
   
6. Worked on beta with developer to create ux & interaction landing pages 
   
7. Had beta test and presentation with college students to reach our goal of 10,000 signups by November.

Takeaways: Students cared for main features of Share Your Story & Ask a Sexpert.

Opportunities:

• Can address $8B/annually on youth STDs
• Impact sexual health and wellness
• 1 million search results on sex/monthly
• Access to expertise

Outcome

Results: Mobile-friendly website with a landing page, account sign up, share your story feature, talk to a sexpert feature, email marketing, animation video, and press materials.

I worked with a developer on a web app for mobile and desktop-friendly devices using a simple google doc and putting in HTML/CSS codes on specific UI sizes, colors, and more.

First, we worked on our user personas and target market of teens tocollege, where sex-ed is the most important. We’d come up with a list of what users could do within our driven framework we thought about based off of user research we did with surveys and by asking teens in a mall.

I made quick sketches/mockups, did some research on core chat functions I should prioritize and then based off the brand identity we had established, created the UI screens. This was a collaborative effort with Brianna, the main founder, and Laura, the engineer, who would provide constant feedback.

Share Your Story interactions:

• Users can submit their stories
• Users can read stories (gets updated constantly as new stories get told)
• Hookup can moderate by approving or deleting
• Users can view who has submitted the story and the date stamp
• Users can upvote
• Upvoting icon of a condom to make it more engaging and interactive. Instead of being the typical thumbs up, I wanted to implement something branded for the app

Ask a Sexpert interactions:

• Users can submit questions
• Users can read answers
• Hookup sexperts will be notified via email of an answer
• Hookup sexperts can answer the question
• Users can see who is active/inactive at the time

Next Steps

After Beta Testing, some findings meant we needed to do more qualitative interviews and continue to refine the features. The plan was to do a series of private beta and then do a mobile launch in November. The founder took part NOLA Startup camp and onboarded a new designer to take over during the summer.

• Q&A Feature
  • Students would get on for 30 seconds and leave (so couldn’t answer questions
  •  push notifications would help 
  • the stories held people’s attention for longer
  • 874 people signed up for the beta by May