A “futurespective” workshop I ran with the Product and Engineering teams to ensure we safeguard children as we design a new educational product.

Situation

The Product and Engineering team had started designing a new major initiative for the business together. In our collaborative design sprint workshops, people had frequently likened the solution to social media as we intended to borrow some recognisable interaction patterns from popular social media apps.

That rang alarm bells in my mind, if we liken it to social media, so might our users. Our educational products impact children, and safeguarding is our top priority in whatever we do.

Therefore if we were going to build a product with similarities to social media, we needed to be particularly careful to safeguard against intended, or unintended misuse.

Objective

Design a solution that safeguards children, whilst not compromising on our use of innovative technology, or the competitive potential of our solution.

Approach

• Educate the team on safeguarding measures schools typically put in place to keep students safe in school. 

• Run a “futurespective” workshop with the product and engineering team involved in the project.

• Address the potential risks of introducing our new product into the school system

• Together we discussed potential ways people may misuse our product, intentionally or unintentionally and what the consequences may be.

• For each problem, we discussed how we might prevent or overcome the risks.

Challenges

It was a difficult subject to approach and we were all remote due to lockdown. Over video call, it was more difficult to read the room and check everyone was comfortable during these difficult conversations.

Outcomes

• A shared agreement to safeguard our new product, by implementing ideas and solutions that spanned design, engineering, marketing and onboarding.

• Commitment from the Product Manager to write key safeguarding solutions into the requirements of the MVP.

• Decisive actions that the team needed to take right away.

• All other ideas documented so that we could easily return to relevant ideas as the project progressed.

• We recognised this needed to be an ongoing discussion, and committed to returning to this question as needed.

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