Tree Testing Model: Appraise Information Architecture

How do you validate the effectiveness of your product’s content organization? How do you ensure you have proper structuring and labeling? How Tree testing can improve your website usability?

Fortunately, it is a fast and effective technique called tree testing, which helps you create categories and labels that make sense to your audience. Tree testing is an excellent technique for testing the information architecture of your website or app.

What is tree testing?

Tree testing is a powerful method in evaluating the hierarchical structure and findability of your content. You may wonder why this testing has the word tree in it. A typical website/mobile app consists of a hierarchy of categories and subcategories, all of which branch out from the homepage/home screen. This hierarchy of content visually looks like a tree. Tree testing is assessing findability within the hierarchy of a website or app and is a fast and effective technique for testing categories and labels with your audience.

"Tree testing is a highly valuable exercise to get a clear view of what real users expect as topics in the navigation of a website and how these topics are clustered from primary to secondary. Tree testing should be the starting point for designing better digital applications."

How does Tree testing work?

Tree testing is a task-based activity. Test participants are asked to find the locations of specific elements in the existing structure. You can analyze where your users would expect to find the information, and you can make improvements to your product based on this behavior.

How is tree testing different from card sorting?

Despite the fact that card sorting and tree testing share the same goal of content categorization, they each approach this goal from a different angle and are used at different times in the content strategy process. In card sorting, users are given a list of content items and asked to group and label them. Card sorting is an excellent technique for understanding how your audience thinks. However, it won’t be very helpful for creating an exact categorization scheme you should follow. Why? Because test participants create their own categories and group items within those categories. It’s not always possible to design the scheme that exactly aligns with the categories proposed by users.

Tree testing asks testers to work with a predefined structure of categories and highlight where they believe an item is most likely to be located. That’s why tree testing is often called “reverse” card sorting. Tree testing is incredibly useful as a follow-up to card sorting because it helps to evaluate a hierarchy according to how it performs in a real-world scenario (when users try to complete a specific task such as finding content on a website or in the app).

What to remember when conducting tree testing?

Tree testing preceded navigation design and helps you to structure information logically. Unlike traditional usability testing, tree testing doesn’t require interaction with the actual products; instead, a simplified text version of the product’s structure is used. To conduct a tree test, you need to prepare two things: a) the hierarchy and b) the tasks or instructions which explain to test participants what they should attempt to find. The goal of tree testing is to find an answer to the question, “Can users find what they are looking for?”

Article by XD ideas