Tree testing
What you'll learn
1. How to evaluate the findability of topics on a website
2. How to establish a baseline for your existing site structure and uncover existing issues and areas for improvement
3. How to compare different versions of your proposed site structure to determine which makes the most sense to your users
4. An understanding of how people find information on your site and if people fail, how long it takes, and the paths taken before settling on an answer
Tree testing is a usability approach that works to evaluate the ease or difficulty of finding topics or categories on a website. Without the influence or distraction of design elements, tree tests feature the text-only version of your product.
The method provides feedback about site navigation and content labels—helping customers improve engagement, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction.
By showing contributors a skeleton of labels and asking for feedback on the effectiveness of their wording and organization, you’re finding out how helpful your site structure is in offering the right information, in the right location.
With this template, easily see and hear your customers remotely as they perform a tree test so you can better speak their language and meet their needs. Its questions are designed to uncover how easily users can find content within your website or apps, and test different label names within your navigation to optimize engagement or conversions.
When it comes to tree testing, and most testing for that matter, the earlier the better. You can either do this step in the research phase or if following the Design Thinking Process, the prototype stage. The results you receive will spotlight any issues you need to address before launch or even highlight the best version of your site if you’re stuck on multiple options.
To prepare, gather an organized list or hierarchy of topics and categories that you want participants to use to answer questions.
Competitive analysis with UserTesting
To stay ahead of the pack, brands often analyze the competition’s strengths and weaknesses to devise winning strategies. This guidebook provides ideas for how UserTesting can help you better understand your competitive differentiators as well as identify areas of opportunity.
Additional resources
Now that you know how to use this template to fit your needs, dive into the resources below to learn how teams across your organization can rely on human insight to create successful, customer-centric products and experiences.
Forrester: UserTesting delivers a 665% ROI over three years
A recent Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) Study, conducted by Forrester on behalf of UserTesting, illustrates how organizations using the UserTesting Human Insight Platform can realize $2.03M in value and 665% in ROI over a three-year period.
