Creating accessible digital experiences to support mental health and wellbeing
Stephen Buckley, Head of Information at Mind describes his organisation's experience creating a new digital platform
Addressing the mental health emergency is a long-term effort. Mind's work to bring people together is really important, especially in a world where it feels like people are more isolated and divided than ever. As part of Mind's vision for improving the visual representation of the charity, we recently embarked on a rebrand that included Side by Side, Mind's online peer support community.
Side by Side is available 24/7 and was created to be a safe space where people with mental health problems can share their experiences, connect with others, and give support in a safely moderated environment. It sits apart from the Mind corporate website and historically had its own distinctive brand, but we wanted to make sure that it was very clearly part of Mind's offering. At the same time we wanted to prioritise and improve the accessibility of the site, ensure our systems and processes were as robust as possible - and that we use the full potential of digital to connect people. We partnered with digital consultancy dxw, to work on these objectives.
Understand the user's perspective
Having gathered feedback from our users, it was clear that the main feed on the Side by Side site could sometimes be overwhelming for users when they first visited, or visited for the first time in a few days. There could be hundreds and hundreds of new posts and we also had feedback that some people found some posting styles quite difficult.
Making sure support is accessible to everyone, all the time, is really important. The user experience needs to be easy and intuitive, so we set about improving the onboarding process for new members. Working together the team helped to define a better way to bring in new and returning members, so they could reintroduce themselves back to the community and be welcomed by existing members.
Creating a sense of community
In the previous service incarnation, we found people were cycling in and out of crises quite quickly, and it was difficult to always offer support in an appropriate way. We wanted to try and make Side by Side a place of positive peer support. So, we developed a tagging feature to help people identify what they are looking for, either in general or a particular post that they want to find. It's helped people to introduce themselves to the community and the pressure isn't now just purely on the staff team or the moderator team to welcome them.
We have found the tags really useful for framing posts positively and giving a message of hope and togetherness. It makes it easier for people to identify other members on the site who have similar interests and who are looking for similar support. This has helped smaller sub-communities to form based around particular needs and it now feels like a real community.
A new filters feature was also produced and has helped users of the site to manage difficult topics and find relevant posts. The previous filter system was hidden, and it could take hours of scrolling to find it. The new feature is accessible and visible, with increased levels of choice available to people in how they can view and interact with the main website feed. This has personalised users' feeds whilst keeping the interface user-friendly and accessible.
The new features and streamlined user experience aims to move Mind further up the scale of Web Accessibility Initiative markers, a series of international standards for the web. So far, there have been 1.2 million posts to Side by Side in the last year, and over 21,000 new sign-ups during that time.
Available 24/7
The Side by Side site needs to be up and running 24/7 and there for people when they need it most. That's critical, especially outside of ‘office hours'. The site is monitored late into the night, but it's really important that it's available in the early hours. That's when the people using it are perhaps at their lowest point or feeling most lonely and vulnerable.
Previously, the team had to coordinate between the hosting company and the developers. The developers did not have full, easy access to the platform and to the hosted environment. This often led to delays fixing urgent issues and this had a knock-on effect when it came to website performance. It also made it more difficult for the team to know who to consult with if an issue arose. We switched to dxw for web hosting and have seen a positive impact on site reliability and uptime. It's much more efficient being able to rely on just one supplier.
Connecting people digitally
There was already a mental health emergency before coronavirus, but the pandemic has increased the scale of need to support the nation's mental health. At a time when so many have felt hopeless and frustrated, it's important to make sure people have a safe place to
find support, anytime and anywhere. Services like Side by Side need to be designed in a way that is user-friendly, accessible and most of all, connects people when they need it most.