A highlighter test is a quick and easy way for researchers (and anyone else) to investigate how well understood content is by tenants and customers.

What you will need

• The content you want to test (online or printed out) - it’s a good idea to remove distracting imagery or logos.
• Green and red highlighters if you’ve printed out your document or a way for people to highlight things online, like Word.
• Instructions for participants.

How to do it

1. Explain the activity to participants (encourage participants to be honest)
2. Leave the printed materials and highlighters in an accessible area or share the document online
3. Remind participants that you are testing the content, not them

You can run this exercise moderated or unmoderated.

Organising feedback

Gather all the feedback together.

To review the results, copy the highlights into a tool like Word and increase or decrease the highlights depending on the results. For example, if one line of content was highlighted red by many people, this should appear darker.

Here is an example from a piece of repairs guidance.

Result

Templates