The development of Sexperience took many twists and turns... and the project is all the better for that. Having suggested about a hundred web ideas to Channel 4 Education, commissioner Matt Locke gave Mint and Lambent Productions some development funding. Our brief? Go and actually meet the teens we were proposing to build a site for. (The forerunner to Sexperience was aimed exclusively at teenagers.)

Conducting user research was a mind-blowing process. The teens we met were simultaneously very similar to our imagined users and utterly different. Their needs were powerful and heartfelt and often totally unmet. They thought our ideas were patronising, embarrassing and useless.

Over the course of six weeks, we kept going back to the drawing board. Each idea we came up with was knocked down by a new bunch of teens.

Eventually we came up with one idea that wasn't knocked down: a video encyclopaedia of sexual experiences. By showing real-life stories without value judgements, we hoped to avoid the patronising, moralising attitude that turns teenagers away from most sex advice websites.

We teamed up with Cheetah Television (who created the videos, wrote the copy and generally brought the site to fruition). After many further iterations of the concept, Sexperience was born.

I hope you like it.