Roughly 4 in 10 people who have the greatest need for gambling treatment and support do not seek any form of treatment, advice or support. The Behavioural Insights Team’s (BIT) Gambling Policy and Research Unit (GPRU) collaborated with the TalkBanStop (TBS) to develop recommendations for how support service providers can optimise online user journeys to increase uptake of their services.
In this report, we give six recommendations for how support service providers’ websites can be improved, by making them simple to use and easy to understand. Based on a behavioural audit of the online user journeys of the key mobile web pages of the TBS organisations (GamCare, Gamban, GAMSTOP), we use TBS as a case study for implementing these recommendations. We give specific examples of barriers that prevent the TBS websites from being simple to use and easy to understand, and we outline suggestions for how TBS can implement these recommendations and resolve the barriers.
Recommendations include:
- Provide direction: Signpost so users can quickly identify the options most relevant to them.
- Remove friction: Put the most important information first and make registration processes easy to navigate.
- Reinforce collaboration with a single identity: Incorporate visible links to partnerships and their service offer.
- Describe services in concrete terms: Make sure homepages outline how services work and help.
- Integrate the user’s language: Ensure the way gambling harm is referred to resonates with users.
- Visualise service benefits: Link previous service user verbatims to specific services.
