Category: We Heart Health Literacy

As longtime We ❤︎ Health Literacy readers know, all content is not created equal. Some words, phrases, or ideas are usually more important than others. So how can you draw attention to your high-priority content?

Designers have all kinds of fancy tricks up their (super-fashionable) sleeves. But today we’d like to focus on bolding, a simple visual cue that you can use to emphasize any content — no designer needed.

Bold text is easy to read, and it really stands out on a page. Done right, it can help people find and understand your key ideas and messages — especially readers who are skimming or scanning.

We use bold text for most of our emphasizing needs, including:

• Highlighting the topic of a bullet or paragraph, so readers who skim can quickly see what the section is about
• Calling attention to a particular word, especially if we’re teaching a key word they might see again
• Underscoring key takeaways — 1 or 2 sentences max!

Why do we like bold best? Because it’s head and shoulders above the alternatives:

• ALL CAPS can be hard to read — AND IT LOOKS LIKE YELLING! No thank you.
• Underlining also isn’t great for readability. And, in our digital world, users can easily mistake it for a hyperlink. Next, please.
• Italics can be hard to read for users with lower literacy levels, so we mostly avoid them in plain language materials. For savvier audiences (like you, dear readers), we use ’em sometimes — mostly to stress a single word or to indicate a book title or foreign phrase.

Remember, when you’re bolding, a little goes a long way. It can be tempting to just bold everything — but trust us, it’s not a good look. If everything is emphasized, nothing stands out. And patchy bolding is especially confusing — readers often don’t know where to look, and they can end up feeling googly eyed, woozy, and disoriented.

The bottom line: Bold text draws your readers’ eyes to key messages and ideas. Use it wisely!

It’s time for yet another installment in our “use simpler words” series. This week’s target: “transmit.”

Why? Because this verb sounds like it’s straight out of a sci-fi novel or ham radio how-to. And the related noun, “transmission,” is more hot rod than Hot Zone.

Consider these examples:

• The flu can be transmitted easily from one person to another.
• Mothers who take HIV medicine while they’re pregnant can lower the risk of mother-to-child HIV transmission.

Holy jargon, Batman! All this fancy fuss, dear readers, when we could use a plain language word like “spread” or “pass.”

Try these instead:

• The flu can spread easily from one person to another.
• Mothers who take HIV medicine while they’re pregnant are less likely to pass HIV to their babies.

The bottom line: When writing about infectious diseases, skip “transmit” and use “spread” or “pass” instead! (When writing about radios, aliens, or cars, it’s up to you.)

Tweet about it: #PlainLanguage PSA from @CommunicateHlth: When writing about how diseases spread, skip “transmit” — your audiences will thank you: https://bit.ly/2ExWD1t #HealthLit #communicateCOVID

Today, we’re digging a little deeper into a topic near and dear to our ❤︎s: user testing! Diehard We ❤︎ Health Literacy fans have read our tips and musings on user testing techniques like focus groups, usability testing, and tree testing. One question we get a lot is: “Where do I actually do the testing?”

Never fear, dear readers, you have options! You can do user testing either in person or remotely. Here are pros and cons of both options.

In-person testing
You can do in-person testing any number of places, from a fancy observation lab to a public library or community center. Choose a space that’s comfortable and conducive to a friendly chat.

Pros:

• It’s easier to build rapport with people when you’re face to face.
• You can see participants’ body language and facial expressions, which can be telling — especially for sensitive topics.
• It’s easier to do certain activities, like collaging, in person.

Cons:

• Renting out a research facility can be expensive, especially if you need an observation room.
• Traveling to the testing location may be a barrier for some participants.

Remote testing
There are lots of free or inexpensive tools available to help you do user testing from anywhere. For example, you can conduct interviews over the phone or lead focus groups via video chat.

Pros:

• It’s generally less expensive than renting a facility.
• Some participants, like busy professionals, may find it logistically easier to volunteer for remote testing.
• For testing methods where you need a larger number of participants to get valid results, like card sorting, remote testing can be more convenient.
• It’s easier to get geographic diversity in your mix of participants.

Cons:

• Using technology can be a barrier for some folks, including those who are likely to struggle with health literacy.
• You’ll miss out on participants’ body language and non-verbal cues.
• There’s always the risk of a technical glitch or outage.

The bottom line: When it comes to user testing, both in-person and remote testing have pros and cons. Pick the approach that’s best for your project!

In our last social media installment, we talked about Facebook, ruler of the social media kingdom. Today we’re moving on to another key player in the social media game — Facebook’s little brother, if you will: Instagram.

Instagram is the biggest photo-sharing app. What does this mean for you, dear readers? New and exciting opportunities to share relevant and meaningful content with your audience! It’s a great way to start a conversation about health — and you know we ❤︎ that.

Let’s dive in. Here are just a few of the things you can do with Instagram:

• Model healthy behaviors. Every day, Instagram is flooded with workout tips, healthy recipes, and inspirational messages to help people live happy and healthy lives. This makes it a great place to share your health messages.
• Get real. A picture is worth a thousand words — and when it shares a story from someone directly impacted by the work you do, it’s worth even more. Instagram is the perfect place to get up close and personal so users feel connected with your brand and inspired to engage.
• Dress up your data. Grab your audience’s attention and spread awareness about the importance of your work by sharing facts in a way that’s visually appealing, like with an infographic or interactive video.
• Promote content for a wider reach. If it’s in your budget, paid promotion is a great way to make sure your target audience sees your content. Plus you can run ads on both Facebook and Instagram using Facebook’s Ad Manager platform to maximize your potential reach.

The bottom line: Use Instagram to share real, relevant, and visually engaging health information with your audience.

It’s probably not news to you that the United States has high rates of obesity, and that the public health community has identified the issue as a top priority. Obesity is something that health communicators often need to write about — and it can be a tough subject to tackle.

There’s strong evidence that overweight and obesity are correlated with a host of health conditions, including high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, depression, and arthritis. But the fact is that improving health outcomes isn’t as simple as telling people to lose weight. People with obesity have likely been told to lose weight throughout their lives, and many have already experienced cycles of weight loss and regain.

So how can you write about weight in a way that’s actionable, compassionate, and effective? We’ve shared general advice for writing about sensitive topics before, but today we’re adding a few weight-specific tips:

• Watch your words. Use person-first language and avoid stigmatizing terms like “morbidly obese.” Remember, no one is their disease. Consider writing about people who have overweight or obesity rather than people who are overweight.
• Skip the value judgments. Avoid language that places moral value on food, like talking about “good” and “bad” foods or “guilt-free” substitutions.
• Acknowledge barriers that people may face, like issues with access to healthy foods and limited opportunities for safe, affordable physical activity.
• Use images your audience can relate to. Choose realistic images with people of all sizes engaging in healthy behaviors.
• Focus on specific steps people can take — like trying new vegetables or getting more physical activity — that can improve health regardless of whether they result in weight loss.

And keep in mind, dear readers, that these tips aren’t just for consumer materials. Doctors often have their own biases about weight, and that can translate to worse health outcomes for people who have overweight or obesity — even if their health concerns aren’t related to weight at all.

By writing in a positive, non-judgmental way, health communicators can model respect and help make sure biases don’t get in the way of good health care. And we really ❤︎ that.

The bottom line: When writing about weight, there’s a lot you can do to create respectful, empowering health messages.

Here at We ❤︎ Health Literacy Headquarters, we just love an outrageous outbreak flick. The feverish stars! The frantic lab tests! The unrealistic but highly entertaining science-y dialogue!

The genre may play fast and loose with the facts, but there’s one outbreak movie from 2011 that (mostly) sticks to the realm of the possible: Contagion. When a viral pandemic infects a billion people, public health professionals come to the rescue and race to find a vaccine.

If there’s one thing we learned from watching this movie, it’s that public health messages sure are memorable when delivered by Kate Winslet and Laurence Fishburne. Here are some pandemic survival messages that Contagion gets right:

• Keep clean. Simple steps like handwashing and keeping your hands away from your mouth and eyes can be the best defense. As the movie puts it, “Stop touching your face.”
• Practice social distancing. Contagion sums up the best plan for when a virus is spreading like a wildfire: “Don’t talk to anyone, don’t touch anyone, stay away from other people.”
• Beware the wonder drug. The internet is full of too-good-to-be-true miracle cures. In real life, as in the movies, it’s best to get your medicine from the experts — not from Jude Law.
• Try not to panic. Some of the scariest scenes in Contagion have nothing to do with germs. It’s when people start to riot and fight over resources that things get really hairy.

Those steps are a good start, but what about our very favorite topic? That’s right, dear readers, clear communication is also super important when attempting to survive a pandemic. Kate Winslet’s character, who works for CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, models these tips for communicating in a crisis:

• Stick to your key message. In an emergency, people need clear information and a bit of comfort. She keeps a cool head and reminds the public, “We’re isolating the sick and quarantining those we believe were exposed.”
• If you can’t translate a word into plain language, give examples. When her use of the word “fomites” gets blank stares, she rattles off a handy list of surfaces that spread disease: “Doorknobs, water fountains, elevator buttons, and each other.”
• Be honest about the risks. A colleague asks if his wife is crazy to make him bleach all his clothes and bathe in the garage before coming in the house. “Not really,” she replies.
• Work with your partners even when it’s difficult. It may be hard to cooperate with local officials who are more worried about bad press than they are about the rising death toll. But take a lesson from Kate: keep communicating. After all, public health is a team effort — especially in an emergency.

The bottom line: Watch Contagion to learn how to survive a pandemic — and how public health professionals can help save the day.

This year’s hurricane season has been pretty brutal so far. Parts of the United States and the Caribbean are just beginning their recovery from the devastation of Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Harvey. And that leaves many of us wondering how we can take action, either personally or professionally.

As health communicators, we have a unique responsibility in an emergency since it’s our job to make information easy for everyone to understand. This is especially important during natural disasters or other public health crises.

From sharing tips for making an emergency supply kit to spreading the word about how to clean up after a flood, it’s on us to make sure important safety messages are clear to consumers — before, during, and after an emergency.

So what do we need to keep in mind when we’re communicating in an emergency?

• Write in plain language. Use short, bulleted lists with actionable headers to communicate easy-to-understand steps for staying safe in a disaster. Check out this example from healthfinder.gov.
• Be specific in your word choices. Vague terms like “respond” and “hazardous” are never helpful, but an emergency is an especially bad time to keep people guessing about what you mean.
• Make your messages accessible to everyone. Think about using icon-driven emergency communication, which can help you reach people with limited English skills and people who have cognitive delays.
• Be honest — but avoid creating unnecessary panic. Be clear about what you know and don’t know. Put risk in context and point out what isn’t dangerous about a situation, too.
• Remember that clear visual communication matters. Infographics can be an effective strategy for communicating weather safety tips — just make sure they’re accurate and well designed.

And if you’d like to donate to help current recovery efforts, check out these guides from The New York Times:

• How to Help Hurricane Irma Victims
• Where to Donate to Harvey Victims

The bottom line: Making health messages easier for everyone to understand is always important — but it’s even more critical in an emergency.

For our latest installment on testing techniques, we’re talking about in-depth interviews, or IDIs. We ❤︎ interviewing because it’s an effective, versatile, and affordable way to get great feedback on health materials, messages, or tools.

What is an in-depth interview? It’s simply a one-on-one conversation between a moderator and a participant. Interviews usually take an hour or less — and they can be done via phone, video chat, or in person.

Some interviews are very structured and follow a formal moderator’s guide. Others are more open ended, allowing the conversation to flow naturally. Here at We ❤︎ Health Literacy Headquarters, we like to strike a nice balance between the 2 approaches.

Here are some specifics about why we ❤︎ interviews:

• They’re effective. You can get a lot of information from an hour-long chat with a participant. Unlike a focus group, where you’re talking to several participants at once, you can dive deep into a topic with a single participant. And usually, you don’t need to interview a ton of people to get valuable insights.
• They’re versatile. Interviews can be helpful at just about any stage of the product development process. For example, you can interview people to find out what they already know about a topic, or you can show folks draft materials to get their feedback.
• They’re affordable. Of all the testing techniques we recommend, interviewing is one of the most low tech — and you can do them just about anywhere.

The bottom line: Try in-depth interviews for an effective, versatile, and affordable way to get audience feedback.

As you know, dear readers, we’re full of nerd love for stuff like public health books, board games, and (duh) Hamilton. But what do we ❤ the most? Health materials designed with the target audience in mind, of course. They make us weak in the knees, put stars in our eyes… and apparently even inspire us to use clichés.

That’s why we were thrilled that the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) wanted to team up to create user-centered educational handouts about tuberculosis (TB) infection — and why we want to share those materials with you.

TB infection (technically known as latent TB infection or LTBI) is a critical health problem that’s often misunderstood. If it’s not treated, TB infection can turn into TB disease, which can be serious — and even deadly. So it’s super important that people at higher risk for TB infection (like refugees and immigrants) get tested for it and, if they’re diagnosed, take medicine to treat it.

Enter MDPH. Their materials take on the challenge of communicating clearly about TB infection while showcasing health literacy best practices. Here are some key takeaways from these stellar materials.

Focus on simple key messages. For example:

• You can have a type of TB and still feel healthy. This is called TB infection.
• It’s important to take medicine for TB infection.

Use pictures and icons. Refugees and immigrants with limited English proficiency may struggle to understand text-heavy English-language materials. The MDPH handouts include illustrations that convey key messages about TB infection.

Give people tailored information. Patients who decide to get treatment for TB infection have to follow a specific treatment and medical care process. That’s why MDPH created:

• A user-friendly TB infection treatment guide that patients can fill in with their doctors
• An information sheet that helps patients choose strategies to remember to take their TB medicine

Leverage research. The MDPH materials reflect target audiences’ input collected through focus groups and message and icon testing.

Address language needs. MDPH translated all messages into 17 different languages. And because refugees and immigrants with limited English proficiency reported a desire to learn English, MDPH created bilingual materials for each language.

The bottom line: Check out the MDPH TB infection educational handouts to see health literacy best practices in action!