6.4 Test whether your content is understandable and actionable.
When designing your study, think about ways to find out if your content is both understandable and actionable. To evaluate whether participants understand the content, ask them to:
- Think out loud as they complete tasks
- Describe what they’ve read in their own words
- Describe what action they would take after reading the content
Learning whether users can understand your content is a very important part of usability testing. But it doesn’t stop there—ultimately, your goal is that users will act on the health messages you created. That’s why you also need to find out if your content is actionable.
With this in mind, don’t limit what you test to measures of comprehension and usability. Include a mix of quantitative and qualitative measures—for example, you can ask users:
- What they would do after reading your content
- How confident they are that they could do what the content is asking
Qualitative measures like these also offer insight into self-efficacy, an important predictor of a user’s ability to adopt healthy behaviors.
