How can we make sure we’re not excluding people from our content and services?
At Parent Talk, we offer advice and guidance to parents and carers all over the UK. Our users come from lots of different backgrounds and have varied life experiences. To help as many people as possible, our advice articles need to be accessible and inclusive.
We’re working on improving this across our website all the time. This includes ensuring the site meets accessibility guidelines. It also means, among other things:
- Thinking about reading age of advice.
- Adding alt text to images on articles.
- Improving user journeys.
- Looking out for assumptions about readers in our content.
Testing if people feel included
But until recently, we were missing some important data. We needed to understand more about whether parents felt that our advice was for them. And — as a result — if we could help them.
To do this, we ran a user testing project with parents we might not have reached before. This included vulnerable and marginalised parents.
One of the key things we found was that people are more likely to read your advice and accept your support if they feel like they’re the target audience for it. This means showing that we welcome all parents and carers, whatever their background or experience.
We also saw some common themes on what makes parents feel that advice is for them, or someone like them. We’re now using these to sense check decisions on the development of the service, and are planning further testing with parents we haven’t yet spoken to.
Some of the themes we saw can be helpful for thinking about how to help users feel included for all types of advice content.
“I feel like this advice is meant for me”
Some of the parents we spoke to said that parenting spaces didn’t always feel welcoming to them. This usually meant classes or groups in their community. Some of the parents who felt less welcome were:
- Dads, where they were in the minority.
- Parents who found socialising difficult, or didn’t enjoy socialising.
- Parents with disabilities (where the set-up wasn’t accessible).
When first visiting our online parenting space, feelings of inclusion depended on a mix of design, topics, text and images. People needed a clear message that they were welcome, regardless of gender, race, family structures, ability and circumstance.
Parents who felt most included told us they thought the intended audience was parents with similar challenges to their own.
“The people giving this advice are like me”
Being able to understand who was giving the advice was key for parents to trust the information. But people also needed to see their own experiences reflected in the team behind the advice.
Parents noticed when they couldn’t see someone in our team who looked like them or had similar experiences to them. Our parenting coaches have a range of backgrounds and life experiences, but this isn’t always obvious from images alone.
We also know that we have some significant gaps in diversity (eg all our coaches are currently white). Some people said they would only feel understood when they could see someone like them. One of the outcomes of the research is a plan to look at ways to recruit a more diverse team.
“This advice is in a format that makes sense to me”
People liked advice when it was easy to understand. For most parents, this meant:
- Text written in simple language.
- A clear structure.
- Bullet points.
For one parent, the advice didn’t resonate because they didn’t enjoy reading. Instead, they said a video or other visual aid could be useful to allow them to get the information they needed. We know that there this is a potential area for us to consider in the future. According to the W3C, visual aids can also sometimes help those with language, processing or memory impairments to understand ideas.
“This advice feels relatable and realistic”
Parents felt reassured by seeing topics that reflected their current or past challenges. It made them feel that other parents were going through the same issues as them.
They also needed practical advice that they felt able to put into action (eg techniques to tackle specific behaviour). But they didn’t want to feel that there were unrealistic expectations on them in times of stress.
“This advice resonates with a view I already have”
For many parents, the sections that resonated most were those that chimed with something they had seen or done themselves. In some cases, they felt reassured that they had done the right thing. In others, it was something they saw as being true because of their own lived experience as a parent.
“This advice feels like it’s not assuming things about my life/my children”
Parents told us that there was a lot of judgment in the parenting community. They felt that this often came from other parents. People were more open to advice when they were being treated with respect. It was also important that advice came without an agenda.
People felt less connected to the advice where it stated things they thought were obvious. Equally, it was important to explain more complex strategies in the article (rather than linking out). On topics likely to cause more stress, parents also wanted to feel like it was OK to get things wrong.
For more information about the research, contact ruth.stokes@actionforchildren.org.uk and aneta.perehinets@actionforchildren.org.uk. We’re also keen to build connections with other content designers and researchers building inclusive spaces, so please get in touch if that’s you.
