Hasta La Ideas

The line between advertising and design agencies has been a blurry one for some time, but it seems to be getting even more malleable now that design is reliant on interfaces and user experience. Advertising seems to find us wherever it can and increasingly on our phones and computers. IDEO recently dove right in to the ad game, working with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy to create Bedsider.org, a service design solution for birth control awareness.

Bedsider.org won our Core77 Design Award for Strategy and Research, mostly because it’s a smart and thorough, multi-faceted approach to behavior design, especially in a complex arena. The National Campaign states that 7 in 10 pregnancies among unmarried 18-29 year-olds are unplanned, and their mission is to change this and educate. IDEO identified the main obstacles to this goal as mis-information (or lack thereof), inconvenience with methods, and materials that don’t speak to the target demographic.

To solve for these, IDEO built a service design solution with a central component of a delightfully navigable website packed with interactive tools on birth control methods, educational and entertaining “Fact or Fiction” animated clips (complete with dancing condoms) illustrated by Kate Binghamton Burt, and “Real Stories” video clips of people telling their sex and birth control stories (MTV Real World confession booth-style).

“Fact or Fiction”

Central to the website (and the project) is tone. IDEO and the National Campaign recognize that they can’t embrace all points of view on young women having sex (their target demographic is 18-29-year-olds), and make no attempts at trying to prevent sex. Rather, Bedsider smartly accepts that sex is going to happen—afterall, the National Campaign is trying to prevent unplanned pregnancy, not sex. So, directed primarily at women, the site adopts a conversational, tell-it-like-it-is tone of a non-judgmental best friend. Several voices add to this tone—the people talking in “Real Stories,” and the engaging female doctor who wraps up the “Fact or Fiction” bits with the medical response about the myths gathered through research. Overall, it speaks to the demographic in their language—straightforward and funny, but helpful.

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