Fostering Digital Resilience Among Youth Who Experienced Cyberbullying: Design Thinking Approach.

BACKGROUND: Cyberbullying affects approximately one-third of Thai secondary school students and has been linked to adverse emotional outcomes and mental health vulnerabilities. Strengthening digital resilience, along with critical thinking, empathy, and help-seeking skills, is essential to empower youth to cope with online risks and promote safer digital behavior. Despite growing recognition of cyberbullying as a critical youth mental health issue, few studies have explored how digital resilience interventions can be co-designed with youth and relevant stakeholders to address the contextual and emotional challenges experienced by affected adolescents. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to develop a youth-centered, theory-informed intervention using a design thinking framework to support digital resilience in addressing cyberbullying. The research repositioned youth with lived cyberbullying experiences from passive persons who experienced abuse to active co-creators of the intervention. Grounded in empowerment principles, nudge theory, and the concept of digital resilience, this approach reimagined cyberbullying prevention through empathy-driven innovation and participatory engagement, generating a contextually grounded model for designing cyberbullying interventions in a Global South context. METHODS: We applied a 5-phase design thinking framework: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Twelve participants were purposively selected as extreme and lead users and key stakeholders. This group engaged in participatory design workshops and included a psychologist, experts, teacher counselors, and LGBTQI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex) students aged 15 to 17 years with lived experience of cyberbullying. Youth participants were recruited in collaboration with school counselors to ensure diversity of experiences and perspectives. Qualitative data from the workshops were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis to identify user needs, guide problem framing, and inform prototype development. A low-fidelity mobile-based prototype in the form of screen mockups was iteratively refined through user testing and expert consultation to ensure theoretical alignment and contextual relevance. RESULTS: The co-creation process identified key challenges, including emotional distress, lack of support, and the rapid spread of harmful content. Youth participants collaboratively designed a virtual community platform featuring peer support spaces, confidential expert consultation, skill-building workshops, a knowledge hub, gamified engagement tools, and artificial intelligence-assisted support. The intervention design was informed by the study's theoretical framework, which guided the development of engagement strategies, supportive communication features, and youth-centered interaction pathways. Iterative refinement contributed to improvements in perceived usability, personalization, and theoretical coherence. Importantly, the process supported youth agency by positioning participants as active co-designers who shaped solutions grounded in their lived experiences. CONCLUSIONS: This study illustrates how a theory-driven, participatory design thinking approach can be used to develop digital prevention and intervention for cyberbullying. By integrating behavioral theory with youth co-creation, the findings provide insights into how youth-centered co-design can inform the development of interventions addressing cyberbullying, highlighting the role of empowerment-oriented and theoretically grounded design processes in engaging youth as active contributors to solution development.