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Unlike online surveys, tree tests are new to most participants. To reduce the number of people who drop out because “this is not what I was expecting”, we need to do a good job of holding their hand throughout the test. This is especially important at the beginning, when they don’t know what to do next.

Most tools provide boilerplate text for the test, but some let us alter it to our needs. The following are tips for tweaking this text to make the study smoother for participants.

This is the first thing participants see when they start a study, so it should concisely answer their two most pressing questions:

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Here’s an example of a welcome message we use in our studies:

Thanks for agreeing to participate! This study will help us find out which parts of the Acme website need re-organizing.

This should take you about 5 minutes to complete, and you may find it more fun than a traditional survey.

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Because a tree test is not a conventional survey, and because most participants haven’t done one before, we will need to show them how it works.

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This is also an opportunity to direct them to other content that we’d like them to see (perhaps another study that they may be interested in), or to return to where they came from. 

All done, great!

If we’re integrating with a commercial panel, we may need to return to their page to register that the participant has completed the study and earned their reward.

It’s common to offer an incentive for user research (see Offering incentives in Chapter 9), and because tree tests typically only take 5 minutes to do, it’s not worth paying each participant. This is why the incentive is usually a prize draw (e.g. “Do our 5-minute survey – win an Apple Watch!”).

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Next: Adding survey questions