Testing

Testing messages and materials throughout the development process is important. You learn what your audience finds most appealing, understandable, and useful, such as which topics are the most important to them, what they already know, the words and numbers most familiar to them, and the images and designs they prefer.

Health Literacy Insights for Audience Testing

You should pay attention to health literacy issues when testing. Here are several health literacy insights for you to consider when doing message and material testing:

• Do background research on your audience’s literacy and numeracy skills
• Partner with adult literacy groups to help recruit readers with weak skills
• Read testing materials and directions aloud to help people with weak skills
• Create tasks for people to do with the information during the sessions and focus on how useful the information is to complete the tasks
• Separate weak and average readers into different testing groups so that weak readers aren’t embarrassed or overpowered by others in the group

Resources for Testing Messages and Materials

Message Testing on a Shoestring Budget 
The Southern Center for Communication, Health & Poverty, University of Georgia
This resource helps communicators adopt message pre-testing as a routine part of health communication practice. The purpose of this multimedia resource is explain how to pre-test messages and materials on a shoestring budget.

NIH National Cancer Institute “Pink Book” – Making Health Communication Programs Work
National Cancer Institute
This book describes a practical approach for planning and implementing health communication efforts.It covers a range of topics, from planning and strategy development, to pretesting materials, to implementing the campaign, to evaluation.

Participatory Materials Development
Harvard School of Public Health
The Health Literacy Studies group from the Harvard School of Public Health examines literacy-related barriers to a variety of health services and care.Here you will find information on how to develop materials with input from the intended audience, as well as examples of materials developed through a participatory process.

Toolkit for Making Written Material Clear and Effective
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
The Toolkit for Making Written Material Clear and Effective is a health literacy resource from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This 11-part Toolkit provides a detailed and comprehensive set of tools to help you make written material in printed formats easier for people to read, understand, and use.