We kicked 2024 off with an exciting project for a creative team at a cultural startup in the UK looking to investigate the daily struggles people experience when engaging with, and deliberating whether or not to share information online. The team sought solid and real-life inspiration to create new stories about how we live with social media today, exploring the good, the bad and the ugly. We have been living and engaging with information online for generations, and online landscapes have continued to grow and evolve. Nevertheless, the question remains, do we really know what goes through people’s minds when they use social media, and more specifically the struggles that may come from this on a day-to-day basis?
Looking for common dilemmas while using social media
The client team had done extensive desk research on this subject before this project but had yet to speak to social media users about their experiences and struggles in their everyday use of social media. They initially considered a focus group but then thought it better to consult some experts in co-creation – Stby. After speaking with the client and understanding what they were looking for, we concluded that organising co-creative workshops would be an effective way forward to help inform and inspire the team to create compelling stories based on the authentic experiences of real people.
Sharing stories that inspire creative ideas
We invited several small groups of participants to join a series of co-creative workshops where they shared stories on their social media usage and struggles. For instance, how and when do you decide to share something you’ve come across with your wider network of contacts? Likewise, how do you respond to someone sharing something you might not be happy with or completely convinced by? In a small group setting, people are confronted with each other’s perspectives and experiences, which helps them to reflect on their own. Even then, we were surprised by how quickly people bonded and shared emotional stories. People laughed and shed tears together, empathised and reflected with each other.
Social media deeply impacts our lives, more than many of us can imagine and creating the space to understand how, quickly became a key part of our research process. With the participants, we reflected on how their online engagement triggers complex emotions and how it reveals the values people and people in their network believe in. In doing so we created a landscape for participants to understand how their values and emotions drive their decision-making online and what the effects of these actions may be.
The workshops generated a lot of stories, some simple, others very complex touching on the many conflicting feelings people experience when using social media. The creative team from the client side sat as observers in these sessions and took notes, sometimes asking questions after hearing the participant’s stories. The team was inspired and found out that there are more nuances in the use of social media than what they initially hypothesised from their desk research – which was super exciting!
We used a digital whiteboard to visually cluster our notes and observations into 3 themes. From these clusters, we proposed new opportunity areas to the creative team to challenge their assumptions. Additionally, we pointed out areas of online engagement that are emotionally complex and/or involve a lot of internal and external struggles and deliberations. The creative team embraced this challenge, they asked us questions relating these opportunities and insights to what they observed in the workshops and started to find new lenses to look at the social media stories they would like to tell in their production.
This is super useful to us in figuring out how to meet folks where they are at in terms of who they are listening to and about what.
Creative Startup Team
A collaborative exploration into the unknown
Stby thrives in projects where we go on a journey of exploration with the client, and this is one of those projects. The client team came out of desk research with what seemed a clear perception of what people may experience when using social media. However, seeing first-hand the broad and complex emotional experiences people go through, the client could start to see new nuances and depth that the desk research had not provided. This project represents a typical journey of discovering unknown unknowns. Digging into the split seconds when people swipe between social media posts, and like, repost, or choose not to share, we have realised how much emotional and thinking processes take place in people’s minds, sometimes without even consciously realising all this.
Coming out of this project, the creative team can now better connect with the people they are designing for, and really step into the shoes of a social media user. They can see their struggles and their joy more clearly so that they can create stories that help people to think through struggles they may have with using their social media.
It was wonderful to see the culmination of the last few weeks of work. The team have been so energised with the process and particularly the findings last week. I am very glad we embarked on this work together!
Producer from the client team