Tree testing guide
Master tree testing with our comprehensive guide. From benefits to overcoming challenges, learn how to optimize your site's navigation effortlessly.
Tree testing guide
A brief introduction to tree testing
Information architecture (IA) as a subject is decades old. For example, the Database for Advances in Information Systems published a paper on building and implementing IA within an organization in 1989, and people were practicing it without putting a name to it for hundreds of years (the Dewey Decimal System in libraries, anyone?).
It wasn't until the internet became a household tool that digital IA was relevant to the masses. The book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, originally published in 1998 by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld, started helping website owners better organize their information hierarchy for public consumption.
Of course, the internet has changed massively since the days of HTML-only sites, and what's possible now for a 2D screen is pretty much only limited by imagination. But with so many design possibilities, how do you know if your website visitors can navigate effectively to find the information they’re looking for?
The answer lies in UX research – specifically, tree testing. You can use this method remotely or in-person to test how easy it is to find information on your website. Using a simplified version of your site's navigation, you ask participants to find specific information within the tree.
The role of tree testing in optimizing IA
Tree testing helps you get quantitative and qualitative feedback on the IA of your website or app at a foundational level. It’s ideal for validating navigation when developing a new product, for whole-site migrations, or when adding new content pages to your site.
So, how does it optimize IA?
Tree testing helps make sure that the structure and organization of your information is intuitive and user-friendly.
Deciding where information belongs might be intuitive to you when you’ve been working on a product design for a long time, but this doesn't mean that everyone else will find the navigation options clear.
Tree testing allows you to take a step back and see how users behave on your site or app and adjust the labels or categories based on your findings.
Users aren't supposed to notice IA – when it's great, it's intuitive for them, and they don't question it. If users do notice the IA, it's likely because they got frustrated at not being able to find what they were looking for. Tree testing can help you find these flaws before you spend time and resources on development.