High quality content is important because it is the main value that users obtain by visiting your website and product. Therefore, it's very important to test your site's content thoroughly through rigorous content testing to make sure that it's relatable, helpful and aligned with your user’s needs.
In this post, we will provide a full guide on content testing, providing a detailed step-by-step guide on how to run content tests as well as common best practices that can help you maximize the impact of the results. Lastly, we will also share insights from industry experts and researchers that will share their best practices as well as tips on running impactful content tests.
What is Content Testing?
Content testing is the research process of evaluating how well your content performs with your users. Through content testing, you can gather user feedback from real users or stakeholders to assess content quality, determining whether the content is clear, engaging, and meets its intended goals. The goal is to ensure that the message, structure, language, and overall presentation are effective and user-friendly.
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Why should I test content?
User engagement is a crucial aspect of content testing in user experience (UX) design that evaluates the effectiveness of visual elements, tone, and language in digital content. It determines whether the target audience can find, understand, and comprehend the content, and pinpoints which words, phrases, and content resonate with them. By conducting disciplined content testing, you can ensure that your value propositions and messaging speak directly to your audience’s needs and interests, creating a more engaging and user-friendly experience.
Why should I engage in content testing?
Conduct content testing is a critical proactive measure to safeguard against poor content. It also helps improve conversion rates by ensuring the content effectively engages users. Ineffective or unclear content can severely disrupt the user experience, leading to confusion, frustration, and disengagement. This can ultimately result in users abandoning the product entirely. By testing content early and iteratively, we can identify and address potential issues before they impact the overall user journey, ensuring the content aligns with user expectations and enhances their interaction with the product.
Here are some of the additional benefits:
- Determine what content resonates, what falls short, and the reasons behind it
- Design accessible products and seamless experiences
- Craft a user-friendly, intuitive experience for your audience
- Select impactful keywords and language that connect with users
- Focus content development on high-priority areas
- Avoid user confusion and interruptions in their experience
In essence, content testing ensures that only high-quality content is incorporated into the product, while any ineffective content is caught and eliminated during the testing phase.
"Content testing exposes whether or not users can adequately find and understand critical information; it’s key to bringing these insights to light, and putting debates on copy changes to rest."
Nikki Anderson
Founder of User Research Academy
Benefits of Content Testing
Content testing offers numerous benefits that can significantly enhance your digital content strategy. By identifying which copy approaches work best and which miss the mark, you can amplify strategies that pay off and refine those that don’t. Content testing helps determine if your content resonates with users, speaks to their pain points, and inspires them to complete desired tasks. It also reveals whether the keywords used align with the target audience’s needs and interests. Ultimately, content testing provides valuable insights into what works, what doesn’t, and the reasons behind it, allowing you to create more effective and impactful content.
What content should be tested?
Content testing should be considered wherever there is content in your product. It is crucial to test content across various stages of development to improve effectiveness and understanding of user needs, including the creation of user personas. All modern web and native app based products have some type of content so almost every product is a good candidate for testing.
Regardless of the industry, any modern digital product will have a home page, error messages, buttons, icons, tool tips, banners, the list goes on and on. At first, you may not really think that those components include content, but the language and text that is contained within those components are all subject for digital content testing.
When deciding what content to prioritize, focus on the tasks that are most urgent or critical for the user. For example, key messages like error notifications in payment flows must be clear and assist the user in completing their task smoothly, because any misunderstanding or vagueness around those messages could significantly compromise the user experience.
Top 5 ways to perform content testing
The key question to ask is what exactly are you testing for? There are five primary aspects to evaluate when assessing in-product content success.
Usability
This evaluates how easily users can interact with your product’s content. Unlike other types of content, product content needs to be concise, which limits the number of words you can use to communicate. The challenge is ensuring that the brief messaging is still clear and easy for users to understand.
Readability
Your content should be immediately readable without requiring users to re-read it multiple times. Keep in mind that users often scan content rather than read every word, so the text needs to be structured for quick comprehension.
Accessibility
This focuses on making your product content usable for all users, including those relying on screen readers or other assistive technologies. Not only does this broaden your potential audience, but it also ensures your product is inclusive and provides a positive experience for everyone.
Searchability
This relates to search engine optimization (SEO) and affects how easily people can find your product or website online. Properly optimizing your content for search engines can significantly boost visibility and drive more users to your site.
Tone and Voice
Your content should reflect your product’s and brand’s voice, speaking to users in a way that resonates with them. Consistent tone and voice help build trust and ensure the content feels aligned with your brand’s personality.
By considering these five areas, you can ensure that your content aligns with user expectations and drives engagement.
When is a good time to perform content testing?
Determining when to test your content can be challenging. On one hand, you want your content to closely resemble what users will experience, but on the other, you don’t want to invest significant time refining content only to find it doesn’t meet user needs.
Like many forms of research and user testing, content testing is most effective when done iteratively throughout the design process. Iterative testing allows for continuous improvement and ensures that content evolves based on user feedback.
Which are the most popular methodologies to test content?
Usability testing
You can adapt a task based usability testing to evaluate content by making a few slight adjustments to the usual method. Typically, usability tests involve participants completing scripted, short, and closed-ended tasks.
For content testing, it’s better to keep tasks open-ended, allowing users to explore the product at their own pace. The aim is to observe how they interact with the website or app, how they find the information they need, and whether they experience any confusion. You want to evaluate whether the content is clear and supports users in successfully navigating and using the product.
This approach provides valuable qualitative insights into what works and what doesn’t, offering guidance on which content may need adjustments. In addition to listening to what users say during the test, pay close attention to their behavior, as it can sometimes reveal contradictions between their actions and verbal feedback.
"You always need to observe and analyze your tester's behaviors because what they do may contradict what they say. That's why using different usability testing methodologies can be helpful when testing your content so that you can enrich the types of insights that you can collect."
Brian Liu
Senior UX Researcher at Microsoft
Cloze Testing
The Cloze test is a powerful tool that can help you measure how your users can understand a piece of text through context and prior knowledge. Usually works by presenting a 125 to 300 word paragraph and removing every fifth or sixth word. Here is a good example of what a Cloze test can look like:
In a traditional Cloze test, you present the text to participants and see how many of the missing words they can correctly guess. If participants answer 60% or above correctly, that is a passing score that indicates that the content is comprehensible.
Card Sorting
Another popular methodology is card sorting. Card sorting is a IA testing method used to understand how users organize and interpret information. It involves asking users to group ideas or data using physical or virtual cards in a way that makes sense to them, which helps reveal where they expect specific content to be located.
There are three main types of card sorting, each serving a different purpose in the process:
- Open card sorting is useful for generating ideas and developing new information structures, typically employed early in the content creation phase.
- Closed card sorting assesses existing information architecture and naming conventions, and is ideal for testing current content.
- Hybrid card sorting combines elements of both open and closed methods, making it valuable throughout the card sorting process, especially during the initial iterations of content development.
Highlight Testing
A highlight test is a great way to understand the emotional connection users have with your content, rather than focusing on how well they comprehend it. As we’ve mentioned before, the voice of your product plays a key role, and this method is perfect for gauging how your copy emotionally connects with users.
"Highlight testing can be really powerful if you want to quickly check whether your content is resonating with your users" - Daniel Wemby, UX Designer
Five-second Testing
A five-second test is a quick and powerful way to gauge how effectively your design communicates at a glance. You show users a design for just five seconds, then ask them questions to see what stuck with them. It’s perfect for testing things like landing page copy, UI elements, or any content that needs to be immediately clear.
The key here is to understand how quickly users can absorb, perceive, and understand the information. You can start with broad questions like, "What was your first impression?" or "What do you remember seeing?" and then dive into more focused ones like, "Which items were on sale?"
"If you were to allow users, say, five minutes to peruse your site—they may come up with a lot to say about your product that aligns with your goals, but it’s unlikely that it would reflect real user behavior and impressions when real users end up on your webpage."
Cori Widen
UX Researcher at Lightricks
Preference Testing
Preference testing consists of showing research participants two to three versions of your design—in this case, with variations in the content—to get an idea of which they prefer and why. It can help you understand the user’s perception of your content, how it makes them think and feel, in order to optimize content in line with those user preferences.
A/B Testing
An A/B test is a fantastic way to compare two versions of content by showing them to different sets of users on a live site and measuring their performance. It’s a powerful tool for gathering quantitative data to see which version resonates better with your audience.
With A/B testing, you can track key metrics like click-through rates (CTR) to quickly identify which variation is performing better. However, to get reliable results, it’s important to have a large enough sample size to ensure statistical significance.
"A/B testing does have its own advantages, however, and provides a great supplement to qualitative studies. Once your company's commitment to usability has grown to a level where you're regularly conducting many forms of user research, A/B testing definitely has its place in the toolbox."
Jacob Nielsen
Founder of NN/g
As Jacob says, A/B testing can be a fantastic addition to your arsenal of research tools to ensure that you can supplement the qualitative studies with quantitative insights.
Readability Testing
Readability formulas are a handy, computer-based tool that can give you a quick assessment of how easy your content is to read by focusing on factors like word length and sentence structure. They’re a simple way to check if your copy leans toward clarity by using shorter words and concise sentences. For the best insights, readability formulas are most effective when used alongside other methods that involve direct user input, as described above.
Preparing for Content Testing
Preparing for content testing is crucial to ensure that the testing process is effective and provides valuable insights. Here are some steps to prepare for the process:
Identifying Goals and Objectives
The first step in preparing for content testing is to identify the goals and objectives of the testing process. What do you want to achieve through the research? Are you looking to improve user engagement, increase conversions, or enhance readability? Defining clear goals and objectives will help you determine the best testing method and ensure that the testing process is focused and effective. For instance, if your goal is to improve the clarity of your content, you might focus on readability tests. If you’re aiming to boost conversions, A/B testing different CTAs could be more appropriate.
Choosing a Testing Method
Once you have identified your goals and objectives, the next step is to choose a testing method. There are various content testing methods, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, A/B testing allows you to compare two versions of content to see which performs better, while task-based usability testing helps you understand how users interact with your content in real-world scenarios. Card sorting can be useful for organizing information in a way that makes sense to users, and cloze tests can assess how well users understand your content. Selecting the right method depends on your specific goals and the type of content you are testing.
Recruiting Test Participants
Recruiting test participants is a critical step in the process. To obtain reliable and relevant feedback, it’s essential to recruit participants who are representative of your target audience. This means considering demographics, interests, and behaviors that align with your user personas. You can recruit participants through various channels, including social media, online forums, and user testing platforms.
By following these steps, you can prepare effectively for content testing, ensuring that the process yields valuable insights and helps you create content that truly resonates with your audience.
A six-step content testing process
Now that you understand why testing content is important and how it fits into your overall content strategy, let’s dive into how you can actually test your content.
1. Identify goals
As you begin planning your test, it’s essential to clarify your objective. Simply put, who are you testing, what are you testing, and what do you hope to learn?
At this stage, you should have a clear understanding of your target users and their needs and expectations for your product. If your product serves a diverse audience, it’s important to ensure that your test includes participants from each demographic. Failing to represent a key group could lead to content that doesn’t fully resonate with all your user personas.
2. Choose your method and create the test
Let’s assume that we want to evaluate whether users can make an online order. To do this, we’ll use tools and conduct a task-based usability test to observe if they can complete the process smoothly. We want to determine if our homepage resonates with our target audience. A highlight test will help us gather insights into how they feel about its design and messaging.
3. Run tests of your study
After crafting your initial test, it’s important to ensure it’s clear and effective by conducting a pilot test. Before recruiting content testers, try running the test with some colleagues or key stakeholders. This quick internal run-through will help you spot any issues or confusion, allowing you to fine-tune the process before moving forward.
"Running tests of your studies is absolutely crucial. You always discover issues and problems that should be addressed before you publish the study to your audiences."
John Chang
Senior UX Designer at Novo
4. Find Test Participants and Content Testers
Finding the right people to participate in your research is crucial. To ensure accurate results, it’s essential to recruit participants who are representative of your target audience. Start by identifying the target audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviors. Creating detailed user personas can guide the recruitment process, ensuring you select participants who closely match your audience.
If you’re running qualitative sessions, you need to find at least five participants. This number will give you a consensus to inform your content decisions. If you want to collect quantitative data, then it’s best to run the test with at least twenty people, more if possible. Ultimately your tester sample size depends on the type of test you’re doing, the method, and the criticality of the project.
The big focus here is to find representative users for the real test. Proxy users, such as the people you work with, may not be the people who use your product. You run the risk of getting biased feedback since they may already know information about the product or content, so the data isn’t reliable.
In our blog post on finding good research participants, we break down seven ways to source participants for your user research. For example, you can find candidates online, use research participant tools, or even reach out to professional networks for feedback.
5. Run the content test
After finding test participants, it’s time to decide whether to run a moderated or unmoderated test, as both approaches offer distinct advantages.
With a moderated test, you have more control during the session. A facilitator can provide real-time guidance and ask follow-up questions that are tailored to the user’s experience or the situation they encounter. This can lead to richer, more nuanced feedback, as you can dig deeper into specific reactions or challenges.
On the other hand, unmoderated testing doesn't require a facilitator, making it more scalable. This type of test is typically run remotely, which allows you to conduct more tests simultaneously, gather a larger volume of quantitative data, and analyze results faster.
Both methods have their strengths, so the best choice depends on your specific research needs and goals.
6. Analyze content test results
After finishing a round of testing, it’s time to dive into the analysis for continuous improvement. By now, you should have a solid understanding of how your content performs overall, as well as specific areas for improvement—whether that’s readability, tone of voice, or other key factors.
What questions should I ask for my content tests?
User feedback is crucial in many of the content testing methods listed above, which involve asking participants follow-up or mid-test questions, but finding the right questions can be challenging. Let’s explore some example questions and the best situations to use them. This will help ensure you gather the most insightful feedback and better understand how users interact with your content.
Goal: Help participants share any problems that they encountered when they interacted with the content for the first time
Here are a few example questions to consider, along with how they can help you gather valuable insights during your content testing:
- "If you could change anything about that information, what would you change?"
- "What was easy to understand in the information, and what was more difficult—can you explain why?"
- "What did you think about that information?"
Each of these questions can help guide meaningful conversations during testing, leading to actionable insights for refining your content.
Goal: Check if participants fully understood your content
Here are two more insightful questions to help you better understand how participants process your content:
- "Could you please explain the information in your own words?"
- "If you had to tell someone what you gathered from the information, what would you say?"
Both questions are excellent tools for gauging how well your content is understood and retained by your users.
Goal: Analyze whether any terminology or jargon used in the content is confusing the participants
These two questions are great for identifying language clarity and potential stumbling blocks for users:
- "Were there any words throughout the information that you were unsure of?"
- "If you were retelling the information to someone else, are there any words you think you would have to explain?"
Both questions guide you toward making your content more user-friendly and easily digestible.
Goal: Analyzing how participants interpreted the tone of voice of your content
These two questions are excellent for gaining insight into the emotional tone and perceived personality of your content:
- "What are three words you would use to describe how the information made you feel?"
- "If this information came from a person, what do you think that person may be like—e.g. their appearance, their job, their demeanor?"
Both questions help you evaluate not just the clarity of your content, but also its emotional and personality-driven impact on users.
Tools and Resources to test content
There are numerous content testing tools and resources available for content testing that can help you evaluate and improve your digital content. If you would like to take a look at our curated list of content testing tools, please check out this blog post on top UX research tools.
These tools offer a range of features, such as A/B testing, usability testing, and user feedback, to help designers and marketers evaluate and improve their digital content.
Best Practices
To get the most out of content testing, follow these best practices. By following these best practices, you can ensure that your content testing process is thorough, effective, and yields valuable insights that drive better user experiences.
Content testing is key in UX research strategy
In conclusion, your content is the primary way you communicate with your customers, guiding and engaging them throughout their journey with your product and business. High-quality content is essential for delivering seamless and enjoyable user experiences, and content testing is the tool that helps you achieve that.
Test your content with Hubble
Access every content testing methodology via Hubble's unified platform
