What I Learned When I Asked 15 Young Women About Their Photo Sharing Habits
We just ran our first ever Camp SEEK — a week long intensive program for young women interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, math) related careers. This program was spearheaded by the brilliant Sarah Redmond and I feel very grateful to have been a part of it.
Signing up to participate I knew that I was going to be teaching young girls about UX, with my colleague Rob Scherer, but what I didn’t expect is what I would learn from them.
I got my first glimpse of the ladies at the ‘Women in Tech’ panel on the Monday afternoon.
Despite only meeting that morning, the girls had already become fast friends and were chatting with each other. When the panel started, they gave them their full attention and asked questions that I would expect to hear at any industry women in tech panel, including:
- Have you ever faced discrimination in your work because you are a woman?
- How many women are CEO’s and heads of companies?
Unfortunately we had to tell them yes, and not many, respectively. I chimed in with the fact that there are more dudes named John running companies in the US than women. I don’t see that being a problem for these brilliant young women, however. These will be the girls who do something about that.
Tuesday morning I co-ran a UX session along with Rob. It took a few minutes for them to warm up, but soon they were excitedly explaining their Bad UX experiences to us. They drew some awesome interfaces and were not shy about participating and asking questions. They were everything I wasn’t at 15, but wish I had been — confident, assertive, go-getters. They told us their passions and had ideas for their tech careers, that I hadn’t even begun to imagine in my undergraduate degree, let alone at their age. Our main activity in this session revolved around photo-sharing habits. We let the girls interview each other about this; we analyzed the data using affinity maps; they created interfaces solving a pain point with existing photo sharing apps, and; they usability tested the paper prototypes.
When we analyzed their data, there were some interesting insights in regards to their photo sharing habits.
Here’s what we learned:
- They’re not all on SnapChat and Instagram
- Some even like physical photos and print them off
- They don’t all post publicly, as the media would have us believe
- They are concerned about privacy
- They’re not all self-absorbed and posting selfies — in fact, many spoke about disliking selfies.
One of the girls asked this insightful question “what is the thing you want to get out of posting something online?”. The answers were very honest and introspective:
- To get likes
- To share photos and give assurance to self about ‘coolness’.
Along with the pressure to be ‘cool’ they also spoke about wanting to be able to report explicit content and inappropriate people, or better yet — never see it. They also understood that when people post unkind things they are doing it on purpose to “destroy one’s self-esteem”. These young women do have a lot of body pressure from online sources, but they also have lots of resources online that are body positive.
At the end of the week, we ran a create-a-thon, where each group works on a particular challenge. One team took on a self-esteem project called I’m beautiful anyway. When I spoke to this team, they were all pretty confident with themselves, bodies included, even more so than adult women that I know. Maybe the Internet isn’t all bad for body image, when there are awesome self-love blogs available that these woman are creating and contributing to.
The other teams also accomplished awesome things in the final create-a-thon, like:
- Solving the problems with our public transport smartcard— Myki — that we all face everyday
- Solving all our issues with event planning, including the best date and who’s bringing what
- Setting changing wallpaper themes on mobiles to give you the inspiration you need, like motivation, for example.
One of the girls showed me a website she worked on in year 8 which just blew my mind. This website, created today, involves concepts that I didn’t touch until university.
This was a story about the photo-sharing habits of 16 year-old girls. These smart and amazing 16 year-olds, with their talent, their confidence and their new weapons against the doubts that plague most women — well, I can’t wait to see what they achieve in the future.
If you are, or know a young achiever who is interested in learning about the ICT industry, check out Camp SEEK for more information.
