Designing a new format for parenting advice through insights, trial and error
Parent Talk’s advice content is written by our experienced parenting coaches. Our content designers oversee our content process, ensuring the advice meets the needs of a diverse audience of parents and carers.
Part of the content designers’ role is to keep an eye on how users are interacting with our advice and identify areas for improvement. We use Askem to collect and analyse user feedback and gauge user satisfaction.
User feedback
Our page ‘How do I deal with school refusal and school anxiety?’ is our most viewed article of all time. Since it was first published in August 2020, it’s been viewed 137,000 times. But the satisfaction score was only 60%, which was low compared to our other advice articles. Feedback on the article included:
- “too simplistic and doesn’t express the seriousness and the unhappy atmosphere at home caused by this”
- “Give examples e.g. focus on the core issues — what does this mean?”
- “not addressing teenage with special needs”
I also noticed people gave more long, detailed responses describing their specific situation. Parents talked about their child’s individual needs, what they had already tried and challenges with schools and support systems.
I discussed the feedback with our parenting coaches, who also shared insights from the conversations they were having with parents on our online chat service. We found that the support parents were seeking around school avoidance depended on their stage in the journey and could be broken down into 5 areas:
- what school refusal and school anxiety is and how it presents
- why a child might be refusing to go to school
- how to support a child who is refusing to go to school
- who to go to for help, including the school and other services
- what the options are when you’ve tried everything else
Design inspiration
It was clear that school refusal was a complex issue and we couldn’t provide parents and carers the support they needed through one short article. But we also knew that users were less likely to read to the end of longer articles.
I looked to some other advice sites to see how they presented their advice on complex topics. We saw advice presented in 3 ways:
1. Linked pages
Some sites I looked at broke their advice down into several pages, with a menu on each page to help users navigate the content. You can see this on government websites where they explain policies and processes like maternity leave and pay.
2. Long page with navigation
Other sites kept all the information on one long page. They used anchor links either at the top of the page or in a sidebar so that users could jump to the relevant content. You can see this in Scope’s guide to choosing a school.
3. Pages with expandable content
Others reduced the length of the page by hiding sections of content in expandable content areas (accordions) like Young Minds’ information on anxiety.
We designed our school refusal guide based on the first type. The main way users access our content is directly from a Google search to an advice article, so it felt important for users to land directly on the content that matched their search query. We published 5 pages on the support areas we’d identified and added links at the top of each article so that users could navigate between them.
Unexpected results
We published the school refusal pages in June and watched the feedback and satisfaction votes coming in, hoping to see an improvement.
Instead we saw the opposite. In the first 2 weeks the satisfaction score on the first page of the guide was 38%, by July it dropped to 12%. The feedback? “what advice?!!!!”
We found most traffic was still landing on the first page of the guide and not navigating between the pages as we’d hoped. So most users only saw information about what school refusal was and the risk of attendance fines — not very helpful advice!
A quick design pivot
While it’s disappointing to discover that something you’ve designed doesn’t work as you’d intended, the important thing is what you do next. I could have left it a bit longer to see how users engaged with the page over a longer period. However, I was mindful of the timing. School anxiety is a big issue for families at the start of a new school term, so we had to get it right for September.
The data was telling us that our users weren’t accessing advice beyond the first page, so the priority was to get all the advice on one page. In August we combined the 5 pages back into one long article page with anchor links at the top. Our tech partners worked on a new page template that broke up the page into different colour sections and introduced accordions and by the second week of September we were ready to launch our new guide to school refusal and school anxiety.
Measuring success
Since the new guide launched, I’ve continued to monitor satisfaction scores and feedback each month. The school refusal page continues to be our most visited page with an average of 5,000 monthly page views. But now satisfaction is at an 85% average and gets feedback like this:
“Excellent information. Well presented and a very balanced viewpoint”.
Next steps
As we continue to monitor performance of the guide in the current format, we also want to make sure it’s as accessible as possible to all our users. In the coming months we’re running screen reader and keyboard navigation testing on pages across the website and we’re including this guide to ensure the advice in the accordions can be accessed by users of assistive technologies. Some feedback asked also asked for the guide in a printable format, so we need to further explore the user need for this.
We’re looking at other complex topics we cover on Parent Talk to see what other content would be better presented in a guide format.
Lessons learned
Introducing our first guide was an experiment. Should I have chosen to experiment on real users with our highest traffic article? Perhaps not.
When we launched the first version of the guide, the insights from Askem allowed us to quickly spot the issues with the format and change it. The feedback came from real parents and carers who were seeking advice on school refusal. I wonder if we would have got the same verdict if we’d done usability testing with a prototype first, or even tested a few different formats before choosing one.
The experience has also made me reflect on the idea of best practice in content design. Government Digital Service is widely considered a leader in content design, so taking design inspiration from GOV.UK felt like a relatively safe bet. But it wasn’t right for Parent Talk users. While there’s a lot to be learned from the wider content design and service design community, there’s no substitute for asking your own users.
