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This one comes from InternetNZ, a non-profit Internet advocacy group in New Zealand. When they redesigned their website, they ran several tree tests to check the effectiveness of the new structure. Here’s a task that performed fairly well:
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 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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But tree tests are not all sunshine and lollipops. Some of your tasks will probably look like this one, again from InternetNZ:
The correct answer in under Policies, in a section called Jurisdiction, but 86% 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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You can also see scattering when you download the results as a spreadsheet. Here’s an example from Treejack, on the “Destination” sheet of its downloadable results:
- pic of spreadsheet showing vertical clustering
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The vertical cluster of cells shows that, for a single task, participants chose a wide variety of subtopics under the correct topic.
Studying the click paths of a single task gives us insights into how the tree performed for that particular task. But it’s dangerous to draw conclusions based on only one scenario. What we need to do is look for supporting evidence from the other tasks in our study – see “Finding Finding patterns among tasks” belowtasks later in this chapter.
- show examples from other tools (without pie trees)UserZoom
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Discovering more correct answers
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