How should you we represent content that appears in more than one place in your our tree?

For example, suppose you we have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for a product, and that FAQ page is available from both the Products section and the Support section, like this:

• Products
  • Wizzo-matic
    • Features
    • FAQ
• Support
  • Downloads
  • FAQs
    • Wizzo-matic FAQ
      
      

It could be that this FAQ page is actually duplicated – each section has a separate page with the same content. Or (and this seems to be more common), there is only one actual FAQ page (say, the one in the Support section), and the one in the Products section is just a link to it.

In the tree you’re we’re going to test, do you include weinclude the FAQ topic in both sections, or do you we remove the one in Products because it’s not a “real” content page?

In general, we recommend including both entries in your the tree, because even if the Product-FAQ link just links to the Support section, it’s still a choice that you we give the user when they go to the Wizzo-matic product page. If you didn’t wedidn’t include the Product-FAQ topic in your our tree, you we would be withholding information from the test participant that a visitor to the real site would have.

Later, when you we analyze the results, you we will definitely want to see if participants took the Products-FAQ path or the Support-FAQ path. If you we see that 90% of them go first to the Products section for the FAQ, that suggests that the FAQ should move to live there, and the Support-FAQ topic should just be a link to it.

If you we choose not to include both entries in your our tree, you we can still check the results to see which path the participants took. If a sizable fraction of them went to the section without the FAQ topic, that suggests that you we should at least include a cross-link there when you we design the real site.

What if the duplicated content is not just a single topic (like the FAQ page above), but an entire subtree of topics? Should you we duplicate the entire subtree for testing?

For example, suppose we have a My Account section in our site, which lets users create an account, log into that account, and see a my-account FAQ. It “lives” in the Support section, but we’ve also added a shortcut in the main navigation bar (a utility link and pop-up menu in the upper right of the header):

Here’s how we might represent this in a text tree:

• Products
• Support
  • My account
    • Sign up
    • Login
    • FAQ
  • Downloads
  • Forums
• About us
• My account
  • Sign up
  • Login
  • FAQ
    
    

Notice that My Account appears twice in the tree, because it appears in two places in the global navigation.

Again, in general, we recommend including both subtrees in your the test, because that’s what the user would see in the real site.

The only time you we may not want to duplicate subtrees is if the subtree is very large, and it becomes tedious to keep both instances in sync as you we develop the tree. In that case, you we may want to prune the duplicate that you we think is going to get less traffic during the test.