Content Testing for UX: From Copy to Conversion

Content is fundamental to every aspect of your digital experience. From landing page copy to your in-app instructions, it’s one of the main ways users interact with, understand, and experience your product.

So if your content misses the mark, your user satisfaction metrics will show it.

Content testing is the way to ensure any content across your product, app, or website meets user needs, is clear and readable, and actually resonates with users.

To kick off this guide, we’ll cover when and why to conduct content testing, six ways to evaluate content, and finish up with an example of content testing. Read on…

Content testing is a UX research method that measures the quality and performance of your content. With content testing, you can check if the content you create resonates with users, speaks directly to their pain points, and provides enough context to help them navigate your product and complete tasks successfully.

Ultimately, it ensures your content quality meets your target audience’s needs and expectations. You can conduct content testing at any stage of product development to test product, app, or website content.

There are plenty of ways to gauge how effectively your content engages and guides your users, including:

Content testing is a preemptive tool to prevent bad content from finding its way into your product, app, or webpage. Bad content can completely disrupt the user experience—leaving them confused, unengaged, or potentially driven away from using your product altogether.

Content testing helps you:

Put simply, content testing helps ensure that good content makes it into the product and that bad content never leaves the testing process.

So, what does content testing look for? What are the different parts of content to review?

There are six main ways to evaluate content, each examining a key area of in-product content. During content testing, you can assess these areas by asking the right research questions to your participants.

We spoke to Kate Varga, Senior UX/UI Designer at Creative Navy, for the types of questions she asks when reviewing these content parameters. But before diving into content testing, Kate reminds researchers to look out for cognitive biases:

“When asking direct questions, users may feel inclined to respond favorably toward the product because they feel like they themselves are being tested. The more abstract goal of improving the product seems to fall off their radar.

“To counter this, we avoid simple yes-or-no questions, opting for rating scales instead. Scales provide nuance and reflect the acknowledgement that a product is multi-layered, neither entirely good or bad. Crafting questions that are specific and flexible is essential for capturing these subtleties and gathering meaningful feedback.”

Usability testing is about reviewing how intuitive your content is to engage with. Your aim is to ensure your target audience can effortlessly use your content to complete tasks without unnecessary friction. Assessing content usability contributes to a seamless user experience for your user and helps them smoothly move through the user journey.

55% of users view pages for less than 15 seconds. That’s not a lot of time to get users hooked, reading, and interacting with your digital experience. To ensure they engage, you need to make your content easy to understand.

Users should be able to scan your content once, understand it, and know what further steps to take. The quicker users can absorb information, the better they can grasp key messages, realize your product’s value, and sign up to use it.

Accessibility refers to your product’s ability to provide a great experience to all users—regardless of how they’re consuming your content. Consider how screen readers and other accessibility aids will interact with your content. Not only does this widen your audience, but it creates an inclusive design that everyone can use.

Digital products should follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Aligning your content with this comprehensive framework ensures your product is accessible across a wide range of devices for people with disabilities.

Searchability refers to how easy it is for users to find your digital experience online. Testing for searchability ensures your website is visible and discoverable. By testing and optimizing your content for SEO (search engine optimization), you can drive more traffic towards your content, engage your target audience, and ultimately convert them into paying customers. Besides increasing your organic traffic, testing and ranking high for keywords can boost your brand’s perceived authority.

If your brand could talk, what would it sound like? Consider the tone and voice of your content. Not only does this shape your brand’s identity, but it's also a major tool for resonating with your target audience and users. While voice refers to your brand’s overall personality, tone refers to the attitude you convey in your content—which can differ depending on the content and intentions.

When testing content’s tone and voice, ensure both elements are clear, recognizable, and engage with users on a personal level.

Users should be able to seamlessly move through your content to get the information they came for. While research methods like tree testing are ideal for testing navigability, content testing is an additional way to ensure users can effortlessly interact with your product, complete tasks, and access your features without a hassle.

When testing your content, look for any friction points that signify confusion, overwhelm, and frustration. Users should be able to browse through your content and use navigation elements to progress through the user journey.

Considering these six areas when testing your content will help ensure it’s exactly what your audience wants and needs.

Wherever there is content in your product, it’s worth doing content testing. We’re yet to see a product that uses no content at all (as unique as that would be).

Think about every piece of content on your product—your homepage, error messages, menu buttons, filters, product pages, and more. At first glance, you may not think of this as content, but it is—and it all needs testing.

To decide which content to test, prioritize based on the urgency and importance the task holds for users. If it’s a critical message, such as an error message in payment flows, then it’s vital that users easily understand the content to achieve their goals.

Vaida Pakulyte, UX Lead at Technigo, emphasizes that when planning to test content, “it’s important to give a reference for users to evaluate the content.” For example, you can provide context, such as a design mockup or a prototype.

Include visual elements, buttons, and everything else that will be on the final design. Your users will be seeing your content in context, so the way you test it should be the same (whenever possible).

Determining the right stage of development to test your content is tricky. On the one hand, you want your content to reflect the real content your users will encounter. On the other, you don’t want to spend lots of time creating fully-formed and finalized content only to discover it’s not what your users need.

Ultimately, like most types of research and user testing, content testing works best when used iteratively at multiple stages in the design process.

Let’s take a look at an example.

Let’s say you’ve built a project management SaaS tool for remote teams called TaskTrailer.

You’re unsure how to present instructions for new users on how to create their own projects—should you go in-depth with detailed, long-form text explaining each step? Or should you go for quickfire bullet points to keep it concise?

To decide, you use Maze, a content testing tool which offers A/B content testing to identify the best option.

After recruiting 50 users through Maze Panel, you give half of them version A, and the other half version B. You instruct users to complete the task of creating a project by reading the instructions before them.

Users interacting with version A felt the content was thorough but were overwhelmed by the amount of text. They also had to reread it several times due to unclear instructions. It gets a completion rate of 55%.

Users interacting with content version B, on the other hand, had little to no complaints, and a task completion rate of over 90%.

Based on the results of this test, your team settled on version B with some slight enhancements. You’re definitely keeping the bullet points for readability, and you’ve provided just enough information for users to breeze through your digital product without getting confused: it’s the best of both worlds.

Evaluating content is a key part of user research. It helps you understand if your content is clear, and concise, and if it resonates with your target audience.

By getting feedback, you can make data-backed decisions and ensure content provides a seamless experience that drives engagement, makes processes more intuitive, and even gets you new users.

Next, head to chapter two for steps to performing content testing.