Key points
Testing messages and materials throughout the development process is important. You learn what your audience finds most appealing, understandable, and useful, such as which topics are the most important to them, what they already know, the words and numbers most familiar to them, and the images and designs they prefer.
Health literacy insights for audience testing
You should pay attention to health literacy issues when testing. Here are several health literacy insights for you to consider when doing message and material testing:
- Do background research on your audience's literacy and numeracy skills
- Partner with adult literacy groups to help recruit readers with weak skills
- Read testing materials and directions aloud to help people with weak skills
- Create tasks for people to do with the information during the sessions and focus on how useful the information is to complete the tasks
- Separate weak and average readers into different testing groups so that weak readers aren't embarrassed or overpowered by others in the group
Resources for testing messages and materials
Minority Health Program Focus Group Facilitation, February 2022, West Virginia University Prevention Research Center: This is a recording of a 2-hour training session on facilitating online focus groups. It covers how to draft discussion guides and overcome common focus group challenges.
How to Test the Usability of Documents, May 2020, UX Matters: In this article, two usability consultants describe three ways to test the usability of documents and when to choose each method.
NIH National Cancer Institute "Pink Book" – Making Health Communication Programs Work, National Cancer Institute: This book describes a practical approach for planning and implementing health communication efforts. It covers a range of topics, from planning and strategy development, to pretesting materials, to implementing the campaign, to evaluation.
Participatory Materials Development, Harvard School of Public Health: The Health Literacy Studies group from the Harvard School of Public Health examines literacy-related barriers to a variety of health services and care. Here you will find information on how to develop materials with input from the intended audience, as well as examples of materials developed through a participatory process.
Resources specific to usability testing of digital products
Practical Tips for Accessible Content and Multilingual Websites
In this recording of a webinar from December 3, 2020, hosted by Digital.gov and the Multilingual Community of Practice, two digital accessibility specialists from the Library of Congress discuss the following:
- Integrating accessibility into your everyday practice to help ensure access for people with disabilities
- Central principles of digital accessibility and how these principles remove access barriers and improve user experience for everyone
- Ways you can create content that is usable and understandable
- Accessibility considerations when creating and working with multilingual platforms and content
Sensible: A web usability consultant provides downloadable scripts for usability testing of websites and mobile apps, checklists, instructions for test observers, and more.
Usability.gov: The Digital.gov Team in the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) Technology Transformation Service manages Usabilty.gov.
On their What & Why page, they provide the basics of user experience (UX). UX focuses on having a deep understanding of users, what they need, what they value, their abilities, and also their limitations.
On their Methods page, they provide resources on recruiting usability test participants, conducting website usability testing, reporting usability test results, and more.