Co-Designing User Personas and Risk Scenarios for Evaluating Adolescent Online Safety Interventions

Adolescent online safety research has largely focused on designing interventions for teens, with few evaluations that provide effective online safety solutions. It is challenging to evaluate such solutions without simulating an environment that mimics teens online risks. To overcome this gap, we conducted focus groups with 14 teens to co-design realistic online risk scenarios and their associated user personas, which can be implemented for an ecologically valid evaluation of interventions. We found that teens considered the characteristics of the risky user to be important and designed personas to have traits that align with the risk type, were more believable and authentic, and attracted teens through materialistic content. Teens also redesigned the risky scenarios to be subtle in information breaching, harsher in cyberbullying, and convincing in tricking the teen. Overall, this work provides an in-depth understanding of the types of bad actors and risky scenarios teens design for realistic research experimentation.