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This is a place for digital teams in the NHS to work together and develop the NHS digital service manual.
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Questions in headings #475

Open sarawilcox opened 1 year ago

sarawilcox commented 1 year ago

Recent discussion on NHS.UK Slack

The question has come up previously about whether to have questions as H2s etc, and the consensus then was that it was ok.

On the NHS website, colonoscopy uses "What is a colonoscopy?" as an H1. It was transformed a few years ago.

We have used them in the H1s for overview pages in transformed content, like "What is pancreatic cancer?" But we don't think that would work as an H1 for a single transformed page.

GOV.UK advice:

Do not use:

  • questions - they’re hard to front-load (putting the most important information first) and users want answers, not questions

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-uk

ONS gives an example:

Guidance from the Government Digital Service (GDS) is to use short, clear label headings that put the most important information first. These allow users to quickly scan the headings and find the topic they are interested in. For example, “Definition of international migration” is much easier to take meaning from than “What is the standard definition of international migration?“.

In question pages in forms, questions are fine, of course: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/question-pages

KarinMochan commented 7 months ago

While I'm no SEO expert, I'm sure I've heard that questions in headers can work well for search. It can mirror what users are actually searching for, ie typing into the search bar.