Designing an online sex education resource for gender-diverse youth

Transgender and gender-diverse youth deserve proper sex education, but current educational and clinical structures largely ignore their developmental experiences. As a result, many of these teens go online to seek crucial information. Designers and researchers alike can benefit from an understanding of the design needs of gender-diverse youth for sex education online resources. We recruited 19 gender-diverse youth, ages 15 to 21, to participate in a mix of in-person and online design methods. This research makes three contributions; 1) identification of preferences for where gender-diverse teens prefer to get certain kinds of sexual health information, 2) design considerations for an online resource, 3a) a new method for eliciting preferences, the Four Corners Exercise, and 3b) a new method for combining the Asynchronous Remote Community (ARC) method with in-person sessions. Through this research, we provide key considerations in developing an online sex education resource for gender-diverse youth.