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| Pattern | Observation | Probable cause |
|---|---|---|
| Scattering under a topic | Across several tasks, participants who pass through a particular mid-level topic all pick different subtopics. | The subtopics are not clear and distinguishable. |
| Backtracking at a topic | Across several tasks, participants who click a particular topic (usually a mid-level topic) look at its subtopics and then back up a level. | They are misinterpreting the topic altogether. It could also mean that you are missing an important subtopic, but that’s less likely when the same thing happens across different tasks. |
| A topic attracts clicks when it shouldn’t | Across several tasks, participants keep choosing a topic even though it’s wrong for most of them. They may then scatter or backtrack as described above. | The topic may be an evil attractor – see Discovering evil attractors later in this chapter. |
| A topic doesn’t attract clicks when it should | Participants keep avoiding a certain topic, and this happens across several tasks where it’s on a correct path. | They are interpreting that topic differently than you intended. You may need to do some in-person testing to probe this further, then reword the topic according. |
| Giving up on a certain kind of task or in a certain section | Several similar tasks have high skip rates. | The tree is not supporting those tasks as well as it should. If you notice that people are often giving up in a particular part of your tree, that indicates that the headings in that section are not what people expect. For more, see Where they gave up earlier in this chapter. |
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Next: Analyzing by branches
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