Digital: What’s the harm?
Barnardo’s is working with Nominet and Parent Zone to combat online harms.
We’ve completed the first phase of the project. This seems like a good time to look back at our journey so far.
Why we need a product like Backpack
There is growing concern about online risks that might impact young people. The internet is constantly growing, changing, and evolving. So are the risks it can present to children and young people. It takes time to keep up with terminology, platforms, viral challenges, and the nature of online relationships. That can make it difficult to support young people with online activities and relationships.
The world is full of risks as well as opportunities. Some of those risks and the advice that go with them are familiar, like “don’t talk to strangers.” In digital spaces, it isn’t always that straightforward. There’s new language to get to grips with, not to mention new platforms and media. Most of us have an online presence. You might do your banking online or have a social media account. Whereas older generations tend to make the distinction between online and offline, young people have grown up with the internet and do not tend to see online and offline as separate things.
There are 70,000 youth work professionals in UK and 180,000 volunteers. We know that young people who are vulnerable offline tend to be vulnerable online too. It’s important that these professionals and volunteers can understand digital spaces and help to prevent online risks turning into online harms.
As with real life, online risks exist in context. Not all risks will become harms. Whether they do or not depends on many individual contextual factors. The more professionals understand the digital landscape, the better they can support young people.
What Backpack will do
When we thought about naming this project, a recurring theme was the idea of having everything you needed to understand and combat online harms in one place. That one place became Backpack: a guide to emerging online risks for practitioners.
It’s important for us to make sure that users have the tools and knowledge they need to support young people. It’s also helping young people to help themselves. Backpack will help professionals to find out:
- what new online language and terms mean
- what platforms are out there and how they work
- what risks exist and how to identify them
- how to respond to risks in a contextually appropriate way
- how to work with parents, carers, and young people to develop digital resilience
Backpack will be a web-based project so that professionals, parents, and carers can access the information when they need it.
How we’re designing Backpack
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
During discovery, we did extensive user research with professionals and young people. We needed to verify our hypothesis that professionals need a new way to understand online risks, so we:
- interviewed a broad range of professionals and young people
- analysed service feedback
- did a literature review to see what resources already exist
- built a prototype to test our hypotheses
- usability tested the prototype to make sure that it’s usable for the people who will be using it
- co-designed with young people
We also did some market testing with Good Innovation and video feedback reinforced our initial hypothesis. It showed that there is a lot of interest in Backpack and users who would be keen to see a working prototype.
We now have a detailed and nuanced understanding of what online harm means for professionals, parents and carers, and young people. We understand their needs, and their context, worries and challenges. This will help us develop content that gives them the information they need in the way they need it.
Turning these insights into a usable product is a significant challenge that demands a flexible and user-centred design approach. We workshopped how we might solve the user needs revealed during the discovery and did some early prototyping. A fail-fast approach enables us to try out new ideas and test them with users to see what has value for users before we spend time, money and resource developing a solution.
It’s also important to think about the processes and ethical framework that sit behind Backpack. By bringing together a multidisciplinary team, we can establish the processes and standards in place to validate and quality assure the content we produce to make sure that it’s trustworthy, accurate, contextually appropriate, and sustainable is central to Backpack’s value as a product.
Backpack is going through testing on the second prototype to focus on how easy it is for users to:
- find the information they’re looking for
- understand the information they’re looking for
- use the site
We’re also working with young people and professionals to make sure the content accurately reflects the views and experiences of young people.
We’ve seen consistent interest in Backpack. Users have told us that there’s a real need for it in their day-to-day work:
“You’re basically doing what we’ve spoken about wanting to do in our group…like gathering the intelligence, we were calling it from practitioners but also eventually from young people, and kind of try to put out a regular workforce briefing. But this would be so much better…”
Pilot site response
If you’re interested in finding out more about Backpack, contact us.
