Co‐Designing a Website With Young People to Enable the Uptake of Online, Self‐Help Single Session Interventions for Mental Health: A Participatory Approach

BACKGROUND: Evidence-based self-help digital interventions are a promising approach to low-barrier mental health and well-being support. They could be particularly impactful at the early stages of help-seeking and could reach young people who may not otherwise access any help at all. To capitalise on these interventions, they need to be offered in ways that are engaging and easily navigated by the end-user and promote trust and credibility. Co-designing the implementation of these interventions could enable this. METHODS: We aimed to co-design a website to host self-help digital interventions aimed at young people in the United Kingdom. We used the Design, Develop, Build and Test model to guide our development process. Over 8 months, we ran a series of participatory virtual co-design workshops with young people as contributors (N = 29, 13-18 years). RESULTS: By iteratively moving between the design-development-build phases, we co-created our website, including branding, look and feel, structure, content and functionality. All design decisions were led by what young people told us was most important to them. CONCLUSIONS: Young people's input shaped every aspect of the co-designed unlockwellbeing.org.uk website, from branding to functionality, ensuring relevance, credibility and accessibility. PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION: This descriptive paper presents a practical, experience-informed illustration of how to meaningfully involve young people in the co-design of digital mental health resources. Grounded in both the literature and our own participatory co-design work, we describe the iterative development of a website hosting evidence-based self-help interventions for young people with symptoms of depression. Using the Design, Develop, Build and Test model, we engaged 29 young people aged 13-18 in a series of virtual workshops over 8 months, ensuring that every design decision, from branding to functionality, was led by their input.