Persuasive Application for Sex Education

Young adults are curious, and due to a lack of proper knowledge of sexual health, they often tend to make risky sexual choices. Thus, sex education is important, as it increases individuals' knowledge of sexual health, teaches about safe sex practices and healthy sexual behavior, and enables one to make informed decisions. However, in some countries, like India, sex education is highly neglected due to the societal stigma around the topic of sex. Persuasive interventions have shown success in increasing awareness and promoting desired behaviour. However, most of these interventions consider developed countries. This work aims at investigating persuasive intervention for sex education specifically catered to the Indian audience. Particularly, this work discusses using a persuasive mobile app to help individuals learn about sexual health. As a first step to achieving our goal, we designed a prototype for an app called ‘Sex-Educated’ with persuasive features that aim to promote safe sexual practices and increase awareness about risky sexual behaviour among Indian adults. To evaluate the effectiveness of our app with persuasive design and features, we conducted a user study with 57 participants. Our results show that Indian adults are motivated to use a gamified persuasive app for sexual health education. Our app with persuasive features is much more effective to encourage learning, create awareness, and bring about positive attitude and behavioral changes towards sexual health.