Diversity in words and design — this is how we helped Skeiv Ungdom
At Increo, we like to be challenged. As a rule, it's about some technical challenge — something complex we have to build or fix. But this time it was a little different. Check out our incredibly cool work for queer youth!
Information dissemination with a new website
Queer Youth works for the freedom of all people to be themselves—regardless of gender identity, gender expression and sexuality. Part of their outreach work is about sex, something many young people are naturally curious about. But if you're going to reach a primary target audience between 16-26 today, it doesn't hold up with a brochure.
The mission
The mission we were lucky enough to get was therefore to create a knowledge portal. A portal that young people could easily scroll through and where they could find balanced information presented in a great way. Unlike the PDF version of the brochure, this page was supposed to be experienced interactive and accessible.
The challenges
For us, it has been a wonderful, educational journey to work on this project. Already in the insight phase, where we conducted a workshop with a reference group of volunteers, we were challenged on our own mindsets. We like that. An important lesson we brought into our work was the goal to diversify sex and to expand the concept of sex itself.
It presented some challenges. Technically, that is. SEO-wise, for example: How can we become visible when we don't want to use the terms most people are still searching for? How can we be pointed, but at the same time not too concrete? We quickly realized that this project required a greater awareness of the Norwegian language than about programming languages.
“Is it permissible to say?”
And this is what we worked on the most. Creating great inputs that people would click on -- without it placing anyone in cubicles. Information that included, without it thus also undefined. It required regular check-ins with the clever folks at Skeiv Ungdom, who always had reflective answers to what was okay to say.
We solved the SEO nut by posting a separate FAQ block where the questions have more typical formulations that adolescents themselves use. Pretty smart -- and pretty effective.
More to come
The portal has a young and vibrant design, with many illustrations and a rich color palette. The idea was that the design, like the content, should mirror a diversity. The illustrations -- and the placement of them -- are carefully thought out. They show neither gender nor skin color, taking into account that even the impaired should feel seen and included.
We also created a pretty cool hotspots feature for erogenous zones, and this is just the start of the interactivity. Since the customer wants to always further develop the page with new content, we created the portal in WordPress with Gutenberg blocks. It offers flexibility both today and for the future, and Skeiv Ungdom has an ambition to be able to offer new functionality in the time to come.
Increo is proud to have been able to contribute to the work with such an important message — and looks forward to continued good cooperation with Skeiv Ungdom! 🏳️🌈
Check out the new Knowledge Portal here!
