...
When you’re evaluating a site structure, one of the key things to get right is your top-level navigation, also known as “level 1”. These are typically the headings that appear in your global navigation, often as tabs across the top of the site:
Note that top-level navigation also includes the utility links that appear in the header and footer of most sites (items such as Login, My Account, FAQ, and so on). They’re less prominent than the main headings, but that’s a visual-design choice, and in tree testing we purposely don’t factor in things like visual design.
...
In Treejack, for example, the “First Click” tab that shows, for each task, which top-level headings were clicked. Here’s an example from the InternetNZ tree test that we saw earlier in this chapter:
Task 11 (above) shows a task where the top-level headings were very effective. 96% of participants went to the right section (About us, highlighted in green) on their first click (the “Visited first” column). Besides that high score, notice also that they agreed on where to go – only 1 other top-level heading got any traffic at all.
...