Working With Young People
The services that your local Connexions offer have been designed by young people.
This section of the website explains how young people have been involved in the decision making process.
Website
27th April 2006
We have spoken to young people regularly and young people have attended development meetings when we have been building this website.
Before we built the website we organised feedback sessions and showed young people different designs. Young people commented there were not enough colours, that there should be more photographs and the style of writing should be kept simple. We introduced more colour, photographs in our news stories and changed the writing style.
The design of this site aims to be bright, friendly but also very easy to read because young people have different reading abilities. Sections are colour coded so it is clear they are different and the young person’s section has a slightly different (and funkier) design to the sections more often used by adults. This is based on what young people told us.
This site is a site for young people and images of young people are used throughout.
We also make sure that information is kept short and to the point. Text is presented in black and on a white background to make sure it is clear.
We have also provided a text only version of the site (there is a link at the bottom of the screen) so the site can be viewed on mobile phones or computers that do not show images.
Year Nine Leaflet
27th April 2006
We spoke to 60 Year Nine students from Brayton College. We asked them about their experiences, the issues they face and what kind of information and advice they would like to receive as Year Nine students.
We also asked them to look at some sample designs for our Year Nine leaflet and tell us what they thought of it.
The young people we spoke to highlighted some concerns they had such as exam pressures, laws about alcohol, drugs and sex, health, self-harm and bullying.
We’ve made sure all of these issues have been written about in the Year 9 leaflet.
The young people we spoke to also commented on the designs they saw. Some of the comments are below.
‘this side requires more colour’
‘need colour to make interesting for boys’
‘good use of pictures!’
‘easy on the eye’
‘The headings don’t grab your attention. The writing is short and gets to the point tho’
From these comments we changed some of the headings and added some more colour to make the leaflet as eye-catching as possible.
One young person commented that “the leaflet should be in different formats i.e. DVD form so that all young people can access the info and it would be more interesting”.
Because of this comment we are currently working on putting the Year 9 leaflet content on to our website.