How we named our digital mental health support

Our last research post explained how we worked with young people to understand potential needs for digital mental health support. This post explains how we investigated a possible name for our online support.

What’s in a name?

The name of any digital product is very important. A good name helps users find the product and explains how it might be able to help. We needed a name to resonate with young people and stand out in search.

Asking young people their thoughts

To help us decide, we consulted a range of young people by:

• spending time with our year 6 class from a primary school in Bristol
• sending out a survey to our online panel of young people asking about priorities and ideas for a site name
• sharing a further survey with Barnardo’s mental health services, to pass onto young people they thought might be able to help

What did we ask?

We asked several questions, including:

• things that felt important when naming a mental health site
• how young people would rank three shortlisted names
• if they had other ideas for a name

We suggested a few ideas to start the conversation:

• mymentalhealth.barnardos.org.uk — likely a good option for young people searching for help
• support.barnardos.org.uk — more general, but still relevant for search
• seen.barnardos.org.uk- an example of a more general, stigma-free title that young people might prefer

What did we learn?

Our online panel suggested that a name should be short, easy to remember and point to what the site can do to help. There were a range of opinions when it came to the necessity for “mental health” being part of the title.

“It should be fairly short, it doesn’t have to have ‘mental health’ in the title but it does have to be clear what is it…”

This group suggested a range of other ideas for names, for example help.barnardos.

Of the suggestions we shared, the majority ranked mymentalhealth first, followed by support.barnardos.

The survey sent out to other services also provided some very helpful results. As with the first survey, key themes emerged suggesting what was important for a name. For example, the importance of a name being easy to search and having a degree of personality. Young people also highlighted some helpful points, for example the word “support” made someone think of donating money.

This group also provided other ideas for names, broadly split into those using terms related to mental health, or words related to support/help. Most participants ranked mymentalhealth.barnardos first, although this was slightly fewer than our online panel survey. Again, support.barnardos was a popular second choice, followed by seen.barnardos.

The primary school group felt that a name should be catchy, calming, trustworthy and short. They all chose mymentalhealth.barnardos as their first choice, explaining that it “tells you it’s about mental health” and feels personal.

Whilst our methods weren’t perfect, we would have liked to have spent time discussing the name with our older group, this approach gave us a range of ideas and helped us choose a name for the first iteration of the site.

A name to get us started

Taking all of this feedback into account, we decided to launch with mymentalhealth.barnardos.org.uk. Of the shortlisted names this was the most popular.

There was not a very strong preference for any of the options, so we based our decision on themes of simplicity, being easy to search and explaining what the site does. We will review how helpful this name is as we work, and as young people begin using the site.

For everything on the site, we’ve set up on-site feedback routes to encourage immediate responses and we’ve offered a way for users to volunteer to speak with us 1:1 in future research.

What’s next?

Next up, we’ll be sharing how we worked with Barnardo’s service teams to develop user-focused content for the site.

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.