How to test a new website with tree testing

As part of the ongoing redesign of the Cumbria County Council website using LocalGov Drupal, we have been looking at the highways section. 

As a content designer, one of the first things I do when starting to look at the content, is to examine:

• the data (for example, the number of page views, average time spent on page, percentage of people who view a page and immediately leave)
• the structure 
• how easy it is to find the content, through search and through navigation
• how easy it is to read and understand the content  

There are a number of tools available to help with this process, one of which is tree testing. Two of us worked on this tree testing process:

• Ben Hills-Jones, Content Designer
• Kayo Hayashi, User Researcher

What is tree testing?

Tree testing helps to assess the ‘findability’ of items within a website. The test presents users with a stripped down structure of the information architecture (IA) and it evaluates how easily users are able to find content based solely on the categorisations/ page labels. 

In order to run this test we used an online user experience platform called Optimal Workshop. We decided to use this platform for tree testing as it provides a comprehensive breakdown on user pathways, but also useful visualisations on overall performance. The tree test can also be embedded into a wider survey so that we wouldn’t have to send out the research to respondents in two parts.

Metrics that are measured in tree testing can include:

• whether users were able to complete the task (success or fail)
• how long it took them
• how efficient they were (direct or indirect)

The performance on these metrics can tell us which page labels or parts of the information architecture users are struggling with.