The problem
We had heard from users that they wanted to be able to share parts of the training with their colleagues. We also heard from mentors that they would share the training links with their mentees. We hypothesised that it would be useful to add social media sharing links to the training, to make this easier for users who wanted to share things with others.
Design solution
This had been approached by many organisations before, so we explored the designs that had been implemented by:
- GOV.UK
- Start4Life (NHS)
- MoD
- Parliament petitions
Generally, most of the designs had the social media links at the bottom of the page, and most used the native icons from the social media sites to aid users in recognising them.
We didn't deviate too much from the existing designs out there, so we added links at the bottom of the page, and hypothesised the most useful sites were Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and LinkedIn.
We tested two different call to actions to understand what motivates users to share; achievements or useful content, or both. We also tested different text in the shared post, and included images, or the DfE logo.
How it tested
- All participants had to be prompted to view the sharing icons; it is not something they really acknowledged otherwise.
- This generally seemed like an unnatural behaviour for these participants, although not everyone was wholly against sharing on social media.
- Participants preferred to share posts that had images included, rather than just the DfE logo.
Next steps
We would take the idea of sharing to the co-design workshop we had planned for March 2nd. We would use the sessions to find out more about motivations for sharing on social media. Generally, we needed to test this more to understand if this was meeting a need.