Boosting children's safety online: Help Centres
This results pack was produced by the Behavioural Insights Team for Ofcom. It contains details of an online randomised control trial involving 1,807 13-17-year-olds. This online trial tested different ways to encourage children to access age-appropriate user support materials (or help centre) during the sign-up process of a mock social media platform.
The trial found that including a salient prompt to view the help centre significantly increased clickthrough to the Help Centre (35%) compared to 0.5% in the control arm. Reframing the wording of the typical approach (control) was ineffective, with only 0.7% of participants clicking through.
There is evidence that exposure to the help centre used in the trial led to improved comprehension of the platform’s terms of service, and also that the reframed wording and salient prompts both led to better recall that a help centre existed.