Finding digital mental health support, starting with Barnardo’s

Barnardo’s provides local mental health services across the country, working with local authorities and partners to provide support for young people. Our service teams are always extremely busy and their location-based funding can limit the help they are able to provide.

We think that developing national, online support is worth investigating. This could mean our existing in-person mental health services can expand to support more young people around the UK — offering choice and flexibility beyond the boundaries of a postcode.

Understanding user needs

We always want to get feedback from young people to help us understand any digital product they might actually use. Working with young people means we can learn more about their priorities, needs and concerns about digital mental health support, and what systems and processes we might also need to develop in the organisation to meet these needs.

Understanding user needs means we can be clear about what we build — and why — so anything we develop is both simple and helpful for users, but is also cost-effective and easy for Barnardo’s to maintain.

We’ll also work directly with service teams to understand what they currently offer, and what service commissioners ask for — to see where these combined needs overlap.

Reviewing Barnardo’s service content

Our current mental health service pages are not designed for young people.

We are speaking to service teams to check the accuracy of this existing content, then we’ll rewrite and test a few examples with young people to make sure we publish the information they need at the point that they need it.

We also want to work with services to understand their needs for content, including:

• what they get asked most often when people get in touch
• what information or support they want to share online — & why

We’ll then plan how we can improve our online content — to make it helpful for both potential users and service teams.

Investigating possible support tools

In addition to our own content, we’d like to be able to offer young people new ways to find help. To get us started, we’ll consider if/how recommending a tool/partnership with possible suppliers could provide support.

We need to understand if/how young people might want to use the tools we have in mind, before we spend time and money developing Barnardo’s solutions.

Look and feel

To share any content and tools, we need to check if the design we could inherit from the main Barnardo’s website is appropriate for young people.

We want to understand if our ‘classic’ design suits — or doesn’t suit — the subject matter and the audience, or if a different design, layout, tone of voice and content formats might be worth developing.

Getting regular feedback

To check our work as we go, we will build design prototypes first rather than create live content and tools. This approach will mean we:

• create a visual, usable best-guess set of options — that look/can function like a working website — that we can share with young people to test our theories
• do not create a risk to young people — or Barnardo’s — of something being publicly available but not offering the additional support we think is needed
• develop a better, user-focused product in the long term

Finding a name

When we launch a live product we need to choose a name, and a web address/url for the site to live on.

We have some ideas, but we want to understand which might work or which might put young people off — or even (unknowingly) exist elsewhere.

We’ll also give young people space to suggest their own names and will wait to see if we have a clear leader we can begin with, which also works for search optimisation.

Supporting change in Barnardo’s

Finally, to do all the work we think we’ll need to, and have it become a long-term and well-managed source of help for young people, we have to be clear to all our colleagues what we’re doing — and why.

This blog post is part of that process, so that we can start to share with anyone who’s interested — and some who might not be, yet — why working in this way will mean we can start to:

• help more young people, in ways that suit their needs
• understand how service teams might like to share information and tools to give support, which could then free up more time to offer direct help to those who need it
• identify gaps in our service coverage, where we might provide future help

What’s next

We’ll post more in the coming weeks, starting with how we’re working to understand the needs of young people.

Ellen is a product manager in the Barnardo’s Innovation Lab team.
Follow the lab on Medium to get the latest on all our work.