3 Content Research Techniques to Evaluate Clarity and Comprehension
Learn how to test your content and make sure it’s easy to understand by using these practical research techniques.
Understanding how well a user comprehends your content can be difficult without the right techniques. You may find a participant responding to your question by quoting the text on the screen or giving answers based on their knowledge from other similar experiences.
Here are three techniques I’ve picked up over the years that I’ve found to be really helpful:
- Highlighter testing
- Cloze test
- Heading test
Highlighter test
This is a technique that has become more common in research and there's a good reason for it! A highlighter test allows you to understand which parts of your content users clearly understand, and which parts they find confusing or unclear.
Here’s how it works:
- Provide users with a block of text
- Highlight what is clear and easy to understand in one colour
- Highlight what is unclear, confusing or difficult to understand in another colour.
In-person: This is the most straightforward. Print out the text and give the participant 2 different coloured highlighters.
Remotely: This requires a little bit more effort. It can be harder for participants to complete the test if they are unfamiliar with the software or find it difficult to use.
Remote options that have worked well for me:
- Shared Google Doc - The participant is given temporary edit rights to highlight the text. The participant can read the text and use the ‘Highlighter colour’ to highlight what is clear and unclear in different colours.
- Research platforms - Show the text in full or broken down into smaller parts that the participant can select ‘Clear’ or ‘Unclear’ for. Participants can explain while and most tools automatically tally up the results.
What to avoid
I wouldn’t recommend using any design tools for this activity as most people are unfamiliar with how they work and can be overly complex for new users.
Original source by Pete Gale at GOV.UK: https://userresearch.blog.gov.uk/2014/09/02/a-simple-technique-for-evaluating-content/
Cloze test
A cloze procedure is a test designed for measuring readability. It was developed in the 1950’s by Wilson L. Taylor
Here’s how it works:
- Delete an equal number of words from each paragraph by counting every nth word e.g. every fifth word but this will depend on the length of the paragraph.
- Produce a version of the text with every nth word showing as a blank space. All blank spaces are of equal length so it doesn’t influence the participant.
- Give this version to a participant and ask them to fill in the blanks by guessing what the missing words should be
- Total the number of times the original words were correctly identified. These totals are the readability scores.
- Convert scores to a percentage of correctly guessed words. Anything above 60% would be considered reasonably comprehensible.
This works because:
“If enough words are struck out at random, the blanks will come to represent proportionately all kinds of words to the extent that they occur. The matter boils down to "How many blanks are enough?" A problem to be settled by experiment. - Wilson L. Taylor
When conducting this test it’s important to consider the length of the text and the number of blanks within it.
Heading test
This test was one I created to learn more about which headings matched the meaning of their associated paragraphs. It turned out that it allowed us to identify which heading would summarise the paragraph of text most effectively.
Here’s how it works:
- Write out the content for the paragraph
- Come up with 3 - 5 headings that you think best describe the content
- Show users the paragraph to the participant
- Ask them to select which heading best describes what they read
Pros
- It encourages creativity when experimenting with headings
- Quickly shows if any preferences exist
- Easy to test multiple options at once
Cons
- This technique is less effective if the content of the paragraph isn’t clear.
- If headings are too similar, results may not indicate a single clear direction.
Conclusion
If you’re struggling to pinpoint issues with your content, give one or more of these techniques a try. Each test a different aspect of the content and can pick up things that are easily missed in a standard usability test.
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