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Here’s our take on how does tree testing compares to a few of these methods.

Before tree testing became established, closed card sorts were a popular way to evaluate a site structure.

In a closed sort, participants are given a “pile” of topic cards and asked to put them into pre-named groups. The group names are typically the top-level headings in the site tree:

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Once enough participants have done the closed sort, we can inspect the results to see if they put the right cards into the right buckets and (if not) where they disagreed.

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For more on comparing closed sorts to tree tests, see David Juhlin's well-considered article, Is closed card sorting an outdated technique for IA? 

Usability testing, whether in person or using remote tools, is a powerful technique, but it differs in some major ways from tree testing:

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It's also good to know that that tree-testing results line up nicely with later usability testing, as described in this 2014 academic paper.

Analytics are great because they tell us what our total population of site visitors is actually doing on our site – where they click, where they don’t, and so on.

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Analytics are a great way to see where our users are going, and can reveal issues in our site structure, but on their own they’re not enough. 

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Next:  Chapter 3 - key points

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