Scaling Hello Options with support resources
The quality and comprehensiveness of sex education varies greatly from young person to young person in the United States. Whether it’s information about one’s own anatomy, or about birth control beyond condoms, young people indicate their sexual and reproductive health knowledge is incomplete.
Easy to comprehend, medically accurate information can be difficult for adolescents to locate. Young people indicate existing contraceptive counseling resources often do not show realistic bodies—varied in size, shape, or skin tone—nor do they share anatomical terms that could be helpful, or provide enough detail about how to access or use birth control on one’s own.
At Ci3, my team collaborated with adolescents ages 14 to 17 to co-design contraceptive counseling resources that incorporated design principles and criteria they prioritized. Iterative prototype making and testing, with the Ci3 Youth Advisory Council, Ci3 Co-Design Fellows, and partnering clinicians, resulted in a distinctive step-by-step approach using a combination of visual and narrative storytelling that situates birth control methods in the context of whole and varied bodies and in the context of use.
Project Timeline
Creating support for Hello Options Contraceptive Tool
Ci3 made an important first step to improve the provision of contraceptive care with “Hello Options,” a tangible contraceptive counseling decision aid, co-designed with adolescents and healthcare clinicians. Organized around a central ring, Hello Options includes life-size, tangible models of the most commonly available contraceptive methods. This design ensures that young people have information about the full range of methods which they can see and touch—improving knowledge about how birth control works and busting commonly held myths.
Though many decision aids have been designed and tested, few have demonstrated improvements in contraceptive behavior and satisfaction—with fewer still that are practical and concise enough to be used during the clinical visit.
In a 2021 study, clinicians indicated Hello Options helped young people take a more active role in their decision making. Additionally, both clinicians and patients indicated Hello Options allowed patients to make more informed decisions. To support the use of Hello Options, we wanted to create a set of print and digital resources to provide additional information about birth control methods.
Exploring the current state of contraceptive tear sheets
The design team began the first phase of design research by considering the contraceptive counseling “tear sheet,” a common patient education tool. We collected analogous examples that provided a range of contrasting reference points, using these as a jumping off point to prototype a variety of layouts and using iteration to start developing a point of view that synced to the meta-design principles and tone and voice of our brand—Hello Greenlight.
We engaged young people ages 14 to 17 in a series of co-design workshops to create contraceptive counseling resources to complement the use of Hello Options before, during, and after a patient visit.
To kick-off the first workshop, the design team discussed the different properties that make up visual communications and related careers such as copywriters, illustrators, art directors, and creative directors who expertly craft communications. Next, Ci3 staff discussed the importance of giving feedback and iteration in crafting effective communications and invited workshop participants to give critique a try by evaluating tear sheets for two birth control methods—the ring and the external condom. Ci3's prototypes were included in the mix, but not explicitly identified. After participants spent heads-down time ranking print materials independently (materials had been mailed in advance due to the COVID-19 pandemic), the group discussed their reactions and feelings on a range of topics, including for instance, what information was most important to them, what kinds of visualizations helped, hindered, or prevented them from engaging, and what was missing.
Design principles and criteria
Thematic analysis of the workshop transcript by the Ci3 team yielded a set of design principles and criteria to guide the next phase of prototyping.
Thematic analysis of the workshop transcript by the Ci3 team yielded two primary design principles to guide the next phase of prototyping.
Each principle was supported by a set of design criteria that were used to guide and evaluate the iterative development of patient education materials in subsequent workshops with young people as well as one-on-one feedback sessions with young people and clinicians.
Doing justice to the design criteria
Iterative prototyping revealed myriad opportunities to thoughtfully attend to the nuances deemed essential by young people and to allay concerns raised by clinicians. Iterative prototyping revealed myriad opportunities to thoughtfully attend to the nuances deemed essential by young people. Two vignettes below, organized by design criteria that map to the accompanying project imagery, provide a sense of the deliberations involved in achieving the standards delineated by young people.
Scaling with Hello Options
The next production run of Hello Options will ship with a QR code printed on the back of the birth control pill pack to the web-based version of the adolescent patient contraceptive tear sheets. And, a QR code on the insert included in the Hello Options travel case directs clinicians to individual PDF-version tear sheets that can be uploaded and used with corresponding dot phrases for use as handouts or in electronic health record messaging. Together these Hello Greenlight tools provide adolescents with the information they need and desire to make decisions about their own bodies, lives, and futures.
To date, more than 5,000 units of Hello Options have been purchased by healthcare providers and educators in more than 35 states. The tear sheets have received positive feedback from providers using the unit.