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The time, effort, money, and participants it will take to develop your site tree depends partly on how many rounds of testing you’re intending to do. More rounds usually means a better result (as you would expect), but there are also diminishing returns to consider.
For most projects we work on, 2 rounds of tree testing is standardIn Putting it all together in Chapter 3, we recommended a "full fat" process with 3 rounds of testing:
| Round 1 |
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| Test the existing |
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| tree ( |
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| baseline) |
| Round 2 |
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| Test 2-3 new tree candidates | |
| Round 3 | Revise/retest the best tree (often a hybrid) |
Because of budget or time constraints, this is often cut down to 2 rounds:
| Round 1 | Test the existing tree (baseline) and 2-3 new trees |
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| Round 2 | Revise/retest the best tree (often a hybrid) |
The first round of testing shows you where your tree is doing well (yay!) and where it needs more work. So you make some thoughtful revisions. Careful, though, because even if the problems you found seem to have obvious solutions, you still need to make sure your revisions actually work for users, and don’t cause further problems.
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Note that Round 1 combines the “before” and “after” testing, because most of our clients have a good idea of where the weaknesses are in their existing tree. If you don’t, we recommend a “Round 0” where you test the existing tree; this could the full 3-round approach described above; this can be combined with an open card sort to help generate ideas for the revised structure.
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- add the desired # of rounds into your project schedule
- determine how you will get enough fresh participants for each round
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Next: Which trees will you test?
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