The Right to Understand: A Simple Three-Question Framework to Ensure All Users Can Understand Your Content

Find The Right to Understand: A Simple Three-Question Framework to Ensure All Users Can Understand Your Content on the Knowbility Learning Center

To make digital experiences accessible, we must honor users’ right to understand. But we often “firehose” users with information and features. In this session, we'll share a three-question framework that will prevent you from drowning your users in content. Just as users have the right to accessible content and digital experiences, they have the right to understand. To honor this right, content creators can use plain language, prioritize key concepts, and answer users' questions.

But making content understandable is hard. Too often, we “firehose” people with information and features, making content less accessible.

In this session, we'll introduce a three-question framework to help you make content and tasks as simple and direct as possible. You'll practice paring content down to essentials, and offering more detail without clutter.

Our three-question framework helps content providers answer users’ most basic questions:

1. Where am I? Users need to orient themselves and be reassured they’re in the right place to move forward confidently. We’ll discuss how users interpret the branding, URL, page title, and short text with the main purpose of the page to answer this question.

2. What can I do here? Users attempt to quickly assess what they can do with the content they’re presented with. We’ll show how to give users the option of digging or revealing more and how to help them scan past and skip to the information that matches their intent.

3. What can or should I do next? Content must present outcomes and next steps, set expectations, or reaffirm the user’s choices or decisions. Accessible content doesn’t leave people at a dead end; it provides options for a flow experience.