Investigating digital mental health support with young people
Digital mental health support has continued to grow in importance over the last few years. A March 2022 Government response to a Health and Social Care Committee report, cited the need for open access models and access to digital self-help support. As Barnardo’s works to improve the lives and experiences of children and young people, we have a responsibility to understand and better support this space.
Phase 1: our research approach
Barnardo’s new mental health strategy includes the development of digital support. We needed to understand how this might work, and what support could look like. We started our research by investigating user perceptions of online products they already use, and how these might influence any digital mental health support.
It’s crucial that we understand needs and check our thinking against user feedback in the early phases of any digital concept. As anything we develop aims to support children and young people, their voices need to be at the heart of design and development.
Finding users
To conduct research with young people, we worked with members of the HYPE team, a Barnardo’s health participation service in Plymouth and Bristol. We included young people aged 11–18, both those who were direct service users and those who had not previously been supported by Barnardo’s.
Our fantastic HYPE colleagues brought together 2 groups of young people for us to work with:
- an online panel of 16 young people aged 11 to 17 from around England
- a year 6 class from a primary school in Bristol
Session planning
Responding to a brief with tight deadlines, we crafted an agile plan for our first phase of user research. This involved 4 research sessions, each with a different theme.
We wanted to ask broad questions in each session around users’ understanding of digital mental health support. We also presented initial ideas and designs to get immediate feedback on possible work to develop, or avoid!
Sharing our findings, and learnings
We planned to regularly communicate findings to our wider team, including visual design, content strategy and our in-house web development team, using detailed analysis sessions. These sessions helped us to deliberate over emerging insights, listen to clips of recordings from the sessions, and discuss areas for future investigation.
We also planned to share higher-level findings with colleagues outside of our immediate product team, by presenting overviews of each round of research, including what we learnt and how this impacted our future research and development/build plans.
Round 1: users’ understanding and existing preferences — November 2021
The first round of research took place in November 2021. This was a chance to ask our groups what ‘mental health’ and ‘digital mental health support’ meant to them. We presented several types of content to understand what they might prefer and why.
Young people from our online panel had a good understanding of digital mental health support. Our primary school were less familiar with the concept but could see some of the benefits. Several themes emerged from the first sessions, including:
- the importance of online support being part of a wider offer, with a connection to face to face support/real people
- trust is important, for example being anonymous online can make the experience feel safer
- personalisation, tailoring content and speed are essential, for example, a webchat response needs to be quick, accurate and feel human
As part of the sessions, we also asked young people about different types of content that could feature on a mental health site ranging from written advice, to peer support platforms.
When it came to written advice, young people reflected that this needs to be visually appealing and regularly updated. Furthermore, any examples or accounts of lived experience need to not be ‘shiny’ and must feel relatable.
Videos could be useful, if they are kept up to date, and the groups reflected that any form of webchat support needs to be available 24/7 and offer realistic support. We also discussed peer support forums and microlearning (being sent helpful advice/information on a regular basis). The groups could see the benefits of these forms of support, for example peer support might give relatable advice from those with similar experiences. However, young people also reflected on the downsides, including microlearning potentially leading to self-diagnosis.
Round 2: look and feel — December 2021 and January 2022
The theme for the second session (held online in December, and in person at the primary school in January), was to investigate a possible design. We wanted to get feedback on Barnardo’s current website design/style, alongside some starting ideas for what our platform could look like.
Young people said they wanted information presented in a simple way that is not childish. We shared examples of:
- ‘classic’ Barnardo’s designs, based on our existing main website and design system
- an updated design, which incorporated some of the feedback from round 1
Our young people felt this update was ‘getting there’ but still needed more clarity and easier navigation linking to other pages on the site.
Look out for more detail on the ideas we shared in our next post, from visual designer Amy Steyaert.
Round 3: functionality — January 2022
For our third set of sessions, based on feedback from round 2, we put together 3 mobile-view homepage designs. We’d expected that users would likely want to access support using smaller devices, so we wanted to begin testing our ideas using mobile views.
Clear search functions, which were easy to locate and use, simple categories and descriptions, interactivity and the order of content were important to our groups when it came to general functionality. Young people also confirmed again that sites need to work across multiple devices and be easy to find.
When it came to the designs, the older group preferred bright and colourful pages, as long as they were not overwhelming. The primary school group generally found the navigation of the pages easy to use and felt that they could trust the designs. Both groups mentioned the potential for pages to be overcrowded.
Both older and younger participants also thought about the importance of finding help through trusted sources, for example hearing about mental health support through school or trusted adults.
Round 4: stepping back — February and March 2022
The last round of research took place in February for the older group and March for the primary school. At this point, we’d developed our initial design and wanted to get final feedback for our first phase of work.
Themes emerging from the older group session included the importance of mental health support being welcoming, having urgent help options (somewhere to go if a young person needs immediate support), and providing links to other resources. We also thought about different types of support, for example peer to peer platforms and how these would work in practice.
The final session with our primary school group gave us a chance to carry out some user testing. With the help of iPads provided by the school, we went through our prototype with the class and carried out several activities (including searching for a Barnardo’s service and locating the urgent help option).
Phase 1: live feedback
We’re at the beginning and not the end of this project. To continue to learn more about the first iteration of the platform, we’ve planned two options to collect live feedback from a wider group of users:
- the option to leave comments via a short Hotjar survey
- a banner labelling the site a ‘work-in-progress’ and encouraging users to help us improve it — by signing up to a future research interview
Together with site-usage metrics, we hope that this will provide ongoing insight on the first iteration of the platform. We’ve also compiled a list of findings from our research that need further investigation.
Final reflections
Being part of this project has been a highly rewarding experience that has thrown up several learnings to take forward into phase 2 and wider work. To name just a few:
- the importance of regular communication with multiple team members involved in tight deadlines, weekly stand-ups and catch ups have helped this
- the importance of clearly planned focus group sessions that are engaging, striking the balance between detailed questions, and having fun within a group setting
- not trying to cover too much in a research session, especially when it happens remotely!
Most importantly of all, this project has given us the chance to work with groups of creative and engaged young people. The groups enabled the team to start to think in detail about the types of support we might offer, alongside the opportunity to share our working as we developed ideas.
What’s next?
We’ll post more in the coming weeks, explaining how we developed designs based on our user feedback.
Hector is a user researcher in the Barnardo’s Innovation Lab team.
Follow the lab on Medium to get the latest on all our work.
