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As we can see from the task summary, almost three quarters of our users found a correct answer, with very little backtracking. That’s good to know, but it’s not enough – we need to see where they went, both for the correct and the incorrect cases.
Most tools give you us a way to examine the click paths for a given task. We used Treejack for this study, which offers a “pie tree” diagram showing where participants went:
For this example, let’s concentrate on the paths, not so much the pies themselves:
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Even the wrong answer is not so wrong here. You We could feel pretty confident that users who went to an Our Mission page would get a partial answer for (and probably a link to) the organization’s principles.
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But tree tests are not all sunshine and lollipops. Some of your our tasks will probably look like this one, again from InternetNZ:
The correct answer in under Policies, in a section called Jurisdiction, but 87% of our participants failed to find it. Only 3% gave up, so where did all the others go?
The answer is that they went everywhere. Graphically, this is what “everywhere” looks like:
Quite a mess. But what can we learn from it?
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- Our top-level headings are not clear and distinguishable (which we should be able to confirm by looking for similar results in other tasks), or
- The task itself was not clear (probable if the top-level headings performed well in the other tasks)
You We can also see scattering when you we view the results as a spreadsheet. The vertical cluster of cells shows that, for a single task, participants chose a wide variety of subtopics under the correct topic.
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