Title IX Posters

demystifying Stanford’s Title IX resources and procedures

Remote Internship, Joint project with ASSU and Stanford University President and Provost’s Office, 4 month team project

Challenge

Create two posters to help Stanford students better understand the university’s resources and processes for s*xual assault and harassment.

My Role

User researcher, graphic designer

 

Skills

  • User research and interviewing

  • Figma

  • Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat

  • Procreate

  • Teamwork

 

About Title IX

The Title IX is a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex within educational programs and institutions that receive federal funding. Under this law, Stanford has a Title IX procedure that they use when they receive a report of s*xual harassment/violence/assault. This procedure may, if applicable, include an investigation, hearing, support for the survivor, and disciplinary action against the perpetrator.

 

The Problem

Although Stanford has many resources and processes for students who have experienced s*xual assault or harassment, they often go unused. The many different resources on campus are scattered and hard to find, and the processes available for students to pursue disciplinary action are complex and difficult to understand, especially without legal aid. Previous to these posters, the only way to learn about Stanford’s processes was to read the official legal documents, which were over fifty pages long. Therefore, we decided to create two infographics to help students better understand what resources are available at Stanford and how their Title IX processes work.

 
 

User Research

There were a couple obstacles in conducting user research - this topic is very delicate, and on top of that few Title IX cases that continued all the way through to the investigative and hearing process. And finally, Stanford recently changed their Title IX process, so no cases had yet been heard using the new process.

Because of this, rather than seeking people who had gone through the full Title IX process, we talked to many other people including attorneys, student advocates, and officials within Stanford’s various campus resources. From them, we were able to gain a much better understanding of both the inner workings of Stanford’s resources and processes as well as how they are perceived by students.

 

Insights

Through conducting interviews, we discovered that there was a general lack of trust in Stanford’s systems. However, that alone wasn’t enough to solve this issue, so as we dug deeper we tried to figure out what exactly was causing this distrust. In the end, we discovered these points that we felt led to students feeling like they couldn’t trust the university:

  1. In general, there was far too little information about Stanford’s resources and processes.

  2. Students felt that there was a lack of transparency about how long the process will take, what options they have, and what might lead to potential traumatic situations.

  3. The formal language used in websites and by the officials within Stanford’s resources made them seem cold and uncaring for the students’ feelings and needs.

After discovering these pain points, we brainstormed how to make posters that could solve these issues.

 

Information Gathering

To begin, we gathered as much information as we could about Stanford’s resources and processes.

 

We created a chart with all of the resources in and around Stanford, what they offered, and how to contact them.

 
 
 

We also read the official Title IX Procedure document and created a flow chart of events and important details.

 
 

Ideation

After figuring out what information we wanted in the posters, we began to sketch out possible layouts with the idea that we wanted to include a timeline, information about each “step” of the Title IX procedure, a list of resources, and an explanation of the three different investigative procedures that Stanford has.

 

We then continued to prototype and try new layouts in Figma, showing them to users and rapidly prototyping new ideas.

 

We had the idea to organize the resources so that people could find resources based on what they wanted, rather than listing out each resource and telling them what each offered individually.

We tried to include everything we thought that students would want to know about the process and lay it out in an easy to read format.

 

Prototyping

With a general idea of possible layouts and feedback from many of the people that we interviewed, we moved on to Photoshop to create some rough drafts.

text only version

beginning to add in temporary sketches and icons

added handmade icons and graphics, testing a new color scheme and blocking method

 

Throughout the process, we continually got feedback from users to ensure that it was readable and conveyed the information that we wanted. For example, we added in a “who’s who” box after a couple of people showed confusion at the many different people involved throughout the process.

experimenting with new colors and styles

testing out themes

finding a color scheme and finalizing the style

 

While the process poster was more fleshed out by the time we moved to Photoshop, the resources one was less developed in terms of layout, so we tried many different styles and layouts until we found one that resonated with our users.

geometric, large icon design

testing icons for each item

dividing the information into two different sections

 

After playing around with different styles, we landed on a horizontal, two section style. From there, we iterated on this idea, adding icons and stylizations until the final product was created.

 

Final Posters

Both posters will soon be found on Stanford’s website.

The process poster was created to help people understand Stanford’s investigative processes, particularly the Title IX process. We wanted the poster to be more trauma-inclusive, which included both the language that we used as well as providing warnings of possible trauma-inducing situations that may occur within the process. We also wanted to be clear about what resources are offered to people who go through the process as well as ways other than an investigation and hearing to still pursue university help through the Title IX office.

 
 
 

The resources poster was created to help students find the resources that they want in and around Stanford’s campus. We opted for an organizational structure focusing on what students may be looking for and from there, pointing them to the places that offer those resources. We also wanted to include each office’s reporting obligations and contact information.