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For example, suppose you’re testing a new tree for a large corporate site, and you’ve decide to focus your testing on the sections that handle selling products and supporting them. Those sections might go 4, 5, or even 6 levels deep, which will give you some detailed results.
Suppose you also have an “About Us” About Us section that’s equally deep. If you’re not really interested in testing it, you may want to cut it off at, say, level 2 (at topics like Company History, Staff, Our Vision, Careers, etc.).
- diagram of pruning “About Us”
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You may also want to do some selective pruning after you’ve written your tasks (covered in Chapter ~7). If there’s a section of your site that none of your tasks come anywhere near, you can probably chop its lower sections without affecting your results. While it won’t save users time during the test (you don’t expect them to visit that section anyway), it will save you time preparing the tree.
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An example makes this clearer. Suppose we’re testing the Shimano website. Shimano is best known for cycling products (bike pedals, gears, etc.), but they also make equipment for fishing and rowing.
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If you were testing pure cycling tasks (look for bicycle shoes, check a warranty, read a product FAQ), you could just test the “Cycling” Cycling subtree (with “Shimano Cycling” Shimano Cycling as the root of the tree), because you’d be 99% sure that no one would choose the other sections shown here – they clearly have nothing to do with cycling.
If, however, one of your tasks involved finding the story of how Shimano got started in the bike industry, now it’s not so cut and dried. You could imagine some participants going to the “Corporate” Corporate section to find the company’s history. In that case, you might be best to include these top-level sections, include the full Cycling section (obviously), most or all of the Corporate section, and the top level or two of the Fishing and Rowing sections.
- diagram of selectively pruned Shimano tree
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If you were writing tasks that involved both cycling and fishing, then clearly you would have include all these top-level sections, but you could safely cut the Rowing section short. The bigger problem in this case would be that you’re asking each participant to try both cycling and fishing tasks, and a cyclist (for example) may not know anything about fishing, so their fishing results are going to be suspect. For more on setting different tasks for different user groups, see Writing Tasks - ~ Different tasks for different user groups in Chapter 7.
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Next: Which headings to include/exclude?
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