Using quizzes and polls to self-reflect and guide content

Provide a range of ways to express yourself

About

YoungMinds is the UK's leading charity committed to improving the emotional wellbeing and mental health of children and young people. They campaign, research and influence policy and practice.

In early 2020, YoungMinds designed the YoungMinds Youth Participation app for young people that allows them to help shape and influence their mental health content.

Within the app, YoungMinds have created a quiz/poll feature for young people to reflect on their feelings and share opinions, as well as provide feedback on topics presented to them. These tasks help to gather opinions quickly which enables YoungMinds to tailor content that is mutually agreed on by their audience.

Screen capture of a poll in the YoungMinds app asking young people what type of content they’d like to see on the app.

Key guidance

It may help to have a dedicated team who is responsible for content creation. YoungMinds have an internal team who are responsible for creating the content shared online as well as setting the questions for the polls and quizzes. They will scope out topics and decide which ones need more exploring.

Engage with young people throughout the process to see whether any new features are needed and how they’re received if implemented. Check how young people feel about what’s being done with their input in polls and the quizzes they have completed.

Anticipate whether you’re going to be using a feature frequently before building it. Consider your overall yearly planning and include questions that might impact on future developments that are planned.

By UK law, when asking for protected characteristics such as sexuality, ethnicity, religion etc you will need to provide users with an option that allows them to withhold this information e.g ‘prefer not to say’.

Risks

You may not always be able to fully make use of or deeply understand the responses from quizzes and polls when people remain anonymous which might impact the relevance and/or quality of content created.
You might end up collecting data that doesn’t apply to a diverse range of people unless you set it up in the backend.
If you require answers to more complex or open questions you might consider focus groups, workshops or other qualitative methods like shadowing or interviews.

Where can I find this?

YoungMinds youth participation app

Contact

Jade Williams

Jade.williams@youngminds.org.uk