Which article headline sounds the most interesting?

The headline of any content piece is a critical part of engaging your audience. People click interesting headlines that make them curious — and skip anything that sounds dull, low quality, or offensive to their taste.

Testing article headlines on UsabilityHub is straightforward, and there are several ways to go about it. You can test headlines without any context at all, via a multiple choice question with plain text options. Alternatively, you could include the context of the headline by creating a mockup with Photoshop or Sketch and use a preference test to determine the winner, as seen in this example.

In tests like this, the audience you use is key to getting good data. Recruiting your own audience can be effective because you may have direct access to the audience that you’ve pitched your content to. If you do this, make sure you include a couple of questions to evaluate if your participants are from the intended audience.

Interpreting the data from these tests is usually very simple because you’re only looking to find the headline with the most votes. Finally, asking participants why they chose what they did can give you a great window into the preferences and pet peeves of your audience. Don’t miss out on a chance to get to know them better!