TTC Labs - Co-designing with teens and guardians

Trust, Transparency & Control Labs

Co-designing with teens and guardians

When creating meaningful digital experiences for teens and their guardians, it’s essential to understand their challenges and needs. Co-design is a creative and inclusive way to design with people, by listening to and elevating their diverse perspectives as part of the design process. Find out how Meta and TTC Labs used co-design insights from teens, guardians and experts to build Family Center and education hub.

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Social technology gives teens a way to connect and explore their emerging interests.

Guardians see the value (and inevitability) of their teens being online but they also want to be involved and help make sure their teens have a positive experience.

At Meta, we listen and learn from a wide variety of people to help create positive online experiences for young people and their guardians.

To help us do that, we tapped into the views and voices of teens and guardians as well as experts from government, academia and civil society around the world using a process called co-design.

Illustration of teen on laptop

166 teens

Illustration of guardian on park bench

156 guardians

Illustration of expert

125 experts

Illustration of the earth

from 10 countries

and we’re not done yet!

Teens and guardians talked to us about what was important to them, their concerns, and their ideas on how we can continue approaching building supervised experiences online.

We empowered them to co-create with us ways that services might meet their needs and goals, then we took what we heard and discussed it with experts. After all of this, we developed recommendations....

...that we used to design products that meet the needs of a wide range of families.

We heard that

Teens and guardians want teens to have more independence over time, but it can be hard to figure out how to get there.

Guardians want to respect their teen’s privacy while feeling reassured that they are staying safe.

So Meta created

Family Center, with features that meet the priorities of both guardians and teens. It gives guardians high-level insights on their teen’s activities online, like accounts they follow and a screen time summary…

…while respecting their teen’s privacy and independence by protecting the content of their messages and giving them the option to share reports with their guardians

We heard that

Talking about social media can be challenging (and sometimes awkward) for teens and guardians.

Guardians feel they lack the context to understand their teens’ online experiences.

So we created

Tools that foster better communication between teens and guardians, like discussion guides for difficult conversations...

... and localized campaigns to promote awareness of these tools for teens and guardians.

We heard that

Teens will set screen time limits for themselves when it helps them feel in control....

... but they resent restrictions from guardians that don’t take their social needs into account.

So we created

Screen time limits set by guardians that can easily flex according to a teens schedule and responsibilities...

.... and give teens the chance to request more time when they need it.

But there is still so much we can learn and we are not stopping here

We are committed to...

keeping this work moving forward by meeting even more families
listening and learning
building on what we know and improving product experiences accordingly

Find out what else we learned through our global co-design program and discover opportunities for digital product makers to create family-oriented experiences in our report.

Download the report

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