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As Confab: The Content Strategy Conference approaches, we will be featuring some guest blog posts written by the speakers. The first, written by Ahava Leibtag and Aaron Watkins, gets the series started with a look at testing healthcare content.

-Clinton Forry

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While usability and user interaction professionals have seen great leaps in testing visual design and interfaces, content strategists still struggle with testing content in an effective manner. As Ginny Redish said, “Too many usability tests focus only on finding information or content and not how the information or content works for people.”

Healthcare Content is a Doozy
Healthcare content faces this problem. How many websites have we all visited that provide confusing, complex and sometimes contradictory information on the same page?

At Johns Hopkins Medicine, this is a major challenge, as is convincing internal stakeholders that when it comes to web content, less is often more. Given that the web team works closely with some of the world's leading medical researchers, we find that our internal stakeholders often want to share every aspect of their expertise—a trend we attribute to the demands of academic publishing.

Content Solutions
While the team has made vast improvements to the architecture and design of hopkinsmedicine.org in recent years, our greatest challenge is in identifying and developing consistent content quality.

Frustrated by our ability to measure the effectiveness of the reams of content we were producing, migrating, and managing, we started bouncing around ideas about how we might focus testing on content rather than other elements of the website. We started by asking ourselves the potential questions users ask themselves about content to build our own framework for content testing. Plus, we thought about how to effectively convince our internal stakeholders that less content might actually be more.

Questions about Content
While a usability test may focus on completing tasks while interacting with the interface, content testing has a large number of questions to ask, including:

• Can users find the content they need?
• Can they read the content?
• Can they understand the content?
• Will they act on the content?
• Will they share the content?

These questions seem simple, but require a sophisticated framework for testing individual users. How do we answer the above questions in a reliable and methodical way? How do we avoid asking users if they like content, but instead focus on:

1. How relevant do you find the content?
2. Will you act on the information from the content?
3. Did you find this content useful to you?

Content Testing Frameworks
Luckily, some excellent work has been done in this area, including a great podcast (mp3) by Colleen Jones and Kevin O’Connor available from Boxes and Arrows, called “Testing Content: Early, Often and Well,” as well as an article by Angela Colter on A List Apart called “Testing Content.” It was also interesting to us that both case studies focus on testing health information, which is what we’re currently doing for our case study that we will present at Confab 2011 in May.

Content Testing Approaches
Several practical pieces of advice were present in both articles. First, make sure you use an iterative approach when testing content. If you have ever been involved in usability testing, you know it is the best approach. Further, the idea of content testing an entire site is overwhelming. So, says Kevin O’Connor, “Pick the areas that are business critical and user experience critical. Once you test those, you can apply [your findings] across the site.”

Angela Colter suggests doing a moderated usability test. Don’t ask the user what content they like; instead “find out whether people understand your content, have them read it and apply their new knowledge.”

Practical Takeaways for Testing Content
Some practical suggestions for testing content:

• Use an iterative approach—test, fix and test again until you are sure your content satisfies the majority of your audience(s)
• Pick areas of the site to test that are business critical and user experience critical
• Clearly define your user groups
• Use moderated usability testing to test content
• Make it clear you are testing the content, not the user
• Find out everything you can about how your users understand and integrates the content into their thinking

Sharing Content
What was interesting to us is that neither of these articles addressed the sharing element of content. Testing content so your users find it easy to use, helpful and relevant should obviously be the priority. However, what makes your users go the extra mile to actually share or forward content? That is going to be one of the issues we address in our content testing.

Stakeholder Content
Another relevant issue for content developers and producers is stakeholder content vs. business strategy content vs. user content, which we touched upon earlier. This goes deeper than audience stratification. Rather, when executives, stakeholders and users have different needs and goals for their digital communications, how do you satisfy all parties? The following diagram illustrates the dynamic:

  

In an academic medical center, we can graph the following:

• Executives | Business Strategy | Branding, Identification and Market Differentiation
• Stakeholders | Doctors, Clinicians and Researchers | Conditions, Treatments, Research and Clinical trials
• Users | Ill loved one | Treatments, Doctors, Staff and Hospital Logistics (Parking, Insurance, Cafeteria)

Content Dynamics
How do you cram one huge website into the small space shared by those three large circles? And, how do you please all the different audiences when their goals are very different? In many cases, solving the users’ problems is not always the focus.

Therefore, content testing becomes particularly important, so you can demonstrate to both stakeholders and executives that satisfying users has to be a delicate balance between what they think is relevant and what the user finds valuable.

About the Bloggers
Ahava Leibtag has been a freelance writer for Johns Hopkins Medicine for more than three years (and of course, the sites she has written are perfect). Aaron Watkins has led web strategy at Hopkins Medicine for three years, two as an information architect and one as director of digital strategy.

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