Page Comparison

Perhaps the most common mistake in tree preparation is omitting “hidden” content. This is caused by following the page titles of the site, instead of looking for logical chunks of content.

By “hidden”, we mean content that is on a site page, but doesn’t have a page of its own, so to speak. This most often happens on landing pages, where we talk about topic A on the page, then link to topics B and C a level below. Because A doesn’t have a page title of its own, it “disappears” from our tree, because we’ve been focusing on page titles.

For example, suppose we have a Contact Us section (and suppose we’ve decided to actually include it because its organization needs testing). On the website, the Contact Us page has the company’s main contact info (in New York City), and then links to subpages for Asia and Europe:

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When we put this into a text tree, we get the following:

• Products
• Services
• Contact Us
  • Asia
  • Europe
    
    

Now, when the participant gets a task like “Call up the company at their headquarters”, they click Contact Us and see two choices – Asia or Europe.

What happened is that the “USA” content got lost under the Contact Us topic. Many tree-testing tools only let you choose an answer at the end of the tree (a so-called “leaf node”), so Contact Us would not be selectable. Even in tools that let you select “midway” topics, participants tend to focus on the “next” choices that appear – in this case, Asia and Europe.

Once you’ve spotted this type of implicit content, it’s usually easy to fix. In our example, we would add an explicit USA topic:

• Products
• Services
• Contact Us
  • USA
  • Asia
  • Europe
    
    

Now the tree represents the logical chunks of content on the site, not just a list of page titles.

This is more of a problem with testing existing trees than with new trees that you create yourself, because the existing trees are often extracted from a CMS, and they’re focused on pages and their titles. When you extract an existing tree from a CMS, take some time to compare the “page” tree with the actual content, especially the “hidden” content of landing pages.