Summary: When evaluating content, pay extra attention to whom you recruit. Closely tailor tasks to your participants and get comfortable with silence.
Writing good digital content requires a deep understanding of who your users are, how they think, and what they know. Testing your product’s content with users can help you to determine whether:

Your users can easily understand and process the information
The content has the tone of voice you predefined
There are jargon terms that need to be explained
You can evaluate your content using a variety of methods (including eyetracking and cloze tests), but our favorite way is through usability testing. A content-focused usability test can work much like any other such test, but there are some nuances to consider when the primary goal is evaluating digital copy.

In This Article:
Test Structure & Facilitation
Participants & Tasks
Conclusion
Test Structure & Facilitation
Learn About the Topic and Content
As the researcher or facilitator, you should be extremely familiar with the content you will test and with the domain it belongs to. This is particularly important for people working for agencies, since they may be new to the content area.

For example, let’s imagine we were hired to test the content on Investopedia.com, a site that provides investment news as well as explanations of complex financial concepts written for different experience levels. We’d need to start by spending hours just to explore the site: learning the types of content offered, the target audience(s), and as much as possible about the content. This latter type of knowledge would be particularly important if we weren’t already very familiar with finance or investment.

We’d want to also spend time with the content creators, as well as subject matter experts. As a researcher, you don’t need to become an expert in the topic (investment), but you do need to have a rough idea of what your participants are reading.

Use Moderated Instead of Unmoderated Studies
In remote unmoderated studies, participants work on their own, with no facilitator present. Even though this variation of usability testing is cheaper, we recommend that you do not use it for content studies. When trying to discover how people research a topic, compare offerings, and make decisions, the best approach is to conduct a moderated study, where a facilitator is present (physically or remotely).

Facilitators can ensure that participants process the content naturalistically instead of approaching the task superficially.

Content studies tend to have long stretches of time when the user is simply scanning page after page—in silence. When left alone (such as in a remote unmoderated test), participants may feel awkward and wonder whether they’re helpful. Without proper feedback and reassurance, participants may rush through the test and approach the task in superficial manner. This behavior is often reinforced by the shorter session times common in unmoderated testing (typically 20–30 minutes).

Additionally, having a facilitator enables specific, personalized follow-up and clarification questions, such as “I noticed you hesitated on this paragraph, can you tell me what you were thinking?”

The table below contains more examples of valuable follow-up questions for content studies.

Follow-Up Question Goal
What did you think about that information?

If you could change anything about that information, what would it be?

What was easy or difficult to understand, or why? Encourage participants to share any problems or issues they noticed with the content
What does the word [X] mean to you? Determine whether a technical term makes sense to participants or if it’s jargon and needs better explanation
If you had to explain this to a child, what would you say?

Can you please summarize that information in your own words? Evaluate whether participants understood what they just read

(If they can easily and correctly summarize the content in their own words, it’s a good indication that they understand it. But if they have to look back at the text and read verbatim from it, they probably don’t have a clear understanding.)
Imagine a person said these words to you. Who would that person be?

What would they look or act like?

What job would they have? Subtly prompt the participant to describe the tone of voice of the content
Note: Don’t use the word “content” when speaking with study participants — users don’t typically have the same associations with that word as content professionals.

Be Comfortable with Silence
Being comfortable with silence is important for any kind of facilitation, but it’s especially necessary for content testing.

Expect long stretches of quiet time while the participant focuses on processing the information. Don’t appear impatient. Avoid being interruptive or fidgety. Injecting too many questions while users work breaks their concentration and alters their behavior.

If you need to ask a question mid-task, keep it neutral, such as “What are you thinking?” or “What are you looking for?” Once users answer, let them continue. Resist the temptation to blast questions. Wait until the participant has finished reading and is ready to provide feedback.

Participants & Tasks
Recruit the Right Participants
You should always aim to test your designs with representative users. However, when testing content, you should take extra care to recruit the right participants.

The people evaluating your content should truly be representative of your user population: they should have the same mindset, situation, and user goals — especially when your tasks are content-rich, research-intensive activities.

In other words, the scenario that you give people should match a problem they need to solve in real life. Unlike UI-focused studies, content-focused studies should not ask test participants to “pretend” or “imagine” to be in a situation. The risk of invalidating the study by using the wrong participants is higher for content studies because the participants’ motivation and background knowledge is much more important for obtaining accurate insights.

Consider the National Cancer Institute, a medical reference site that describes various forms of cancer and their treatment. Some of the content is intended for patients and some for healthcare professionals.

People who have been diagnosed with a serious medical condition are more likely to relate to the content accurately than someone asked to pretend to be interested about a disease. Beyond their different level of emotional involvement, patients may know more about the disease from speaking with their doctor or doing their own research. In this situation, it may be acceptable to also recruit the primary caregivers for someone who was diagnosed (for example, a person whose partner had the disease), as long as that person was highly involved in the care.

Testing Before Demo 1

Test comment body