From the Experts: Tree Testing methodology for organizing your content

[Emil Alex]

The article is a companion to the Now Learning course From the Experts: User Experience (UX) Leading Practices: Organizing Content

If you want to learn the practices that help you organize content effectively, enroll in the course.

Tree testing is a usability technique that can help you evaluate how easy or difficult it is for employees to find topics on the portal. It can be used to assess the findability, labeling, and information architecture. With tree testing, you can identify navigation issues early on and make improvements to ensure your users can quickly find the information they need.

This is a sample tree test where you get to experience what your users would see as they go through the exercise. You will be shown a series of tasks. Beneath the task, there will be a menu of categories and subcategories that you can access by clicking on the category. For each task, select which sub-category you would expect to go to in order to complete the displayed task.

Link to the tree test: https://sky.mu-iq.com/run-task-survey?pbid=2367184

Let's get started!

[cielocharomarti]

Hey Emil, this was really fun to do! Thank you!
As a suggestion, I would add some kind of information to tell the user how many questions/tasks are there going to be, since going into it I didn't know how long it would take. 🙂

[katharina_oslo]

Tree test doesn't progress beyond question 1 on Chrome

[michael_njogu]

@cielocharomarti I agree. There needs to be some kind of progress indicator. I would imagine a user performing this unmoderated would get tired after the 8th or so task. Their focus might shift to completing the exercise and not giving accurate feedback. 😀

[AJ Siegel]

@cielocharomarti and @michael_njogu MU-IQ is one of many tree testing tools on the market. None of these are endorsed, sponsored, funded by ServiceNow:

• Optimal Workshop
• Maze
• Usertesting

Probably many more I am not aware of.

[Trudi Belton]

Very useful, helped me realise that there are different ways to view data structures.  That can be hard to accept!