Ypulse Youth Website Profile: NYC Teen Mindspace
Posted by meredith on 07-29-2009
Today we bring an end to the hiatus of our Ypulse Youth Website Profile series with the NYC Health Department’s online health and wellness campaign NYC Teen Mindspace. Initially launched last year, the campaign recently entered its second phase so we thought we’d check in …
What it is… at the heart of the campaign is a series of composite fictional MySpace profiles, each featuring a teen character shown grappling with an issue like depression, dating violence or sexual health through a series of video blogs. The main NYC Teen Mindspace profile (pictured here) acts as a portal to all of the character pages and offers an overview of each issue along with resources.
Who It’s for…New York Teens seeking an authoritative resource and possible council on mental and sexual health issues.
What works for us.. an online mental health resource that brings authoritative information to teens on social networks vs. forcing them to seek out a single standing site on the web. The concept might sound familiar to regular Ypulse readers who recall Anastasia developing a similar resource. Guess you can chalk it up to the power of great minds thinking alike (and hooray for that). As I explored Teen Mindspace, I flashed back to the research Anastasia posted last year on the subject. And according to those findings where teens listed wide availability, safety, anonymity and ease of use among the most important qualities they’d look for in an online health site, these profiles hit on all cylinders. What could be easier to use or more readily available than checking a “friend’s” page?
Myla Harrison, Assistant Commissioner for Child and Adolescent Services, cited MySpace as the ideal main platform for the campaign (although the characters and videos are also accessible on Facebook and YouTube) both for the core demographic (teens of a lower socio-economic class) and the creative capabilities of the template. The design definitely works to the advantage of creating a balance between “peer” and professional support. The focus above the fold of each profile is on the young, relatable spokespeople and their educational, entertaining stories (albeit some are slightly more compelling than others) and below on fact sheets, quick facts, polls and additional resources like hotlines and confidential emails (the latter, I’m assuming would likely be the more popular option).
Challenges.. even though the profiles are clearly identified as “characters” and branded as Teen Mindspace, I still wonder how the blurred lines between fictional profiles and real problems affect the real teens who visit the site (personal messages are directed towards appropriate resources). Currently comments are disabled on the profiles, but I’d be curious to see if allowing teens to interact in a public forum on the site would add another dimension of peer support? Another limitation to the fictional narratives here is the question of what happens once the story runs its course. In this next phase, Mindspace kept momentum and interest up by launching more characters (“Anaya” who had unprotected sex for “sexual health” and “Rosa,” a depressed character with “suicidal thoughts”), but with a finite amount of hard-hitting issues and without some of the natural dynamic quality of social profile, it seems like additional chapters or epilogues might be in order.
Categorized under: Education, Teens, Web
September 4th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
I Woul’d just like too say i believe that what you are doing is something wonderful and i hope that you continue to do what you are doing.
June 17th, 2010 at 11:52 am
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