The whole point of running a tree test is to find out which parts of the tree work well and (more urgently) which parts don’t, for the most common and critical activities that our users do on the site.
We largely determine this by:
- examining the results of individual tasks
- looking for patterns among tasks
Task success rate
The most important metric for a task
Where they went
Inspecting high- and low-success tasks
What they clicked first
Did participants agree on where to start, or did they scatter?
Directness – where they backtracked
Directness scoring, backing up from incorrect vs. correct paths
Task speed - where they slowed down
Task times vs. click times, and why they took longer
Where they gave up
Looking for patterns in skipped tasks
Confidence
- summary text here
Were they sure of their answer, or doubtful?
Dealing with outliers
When to ignore strange results from a few participants
Finding patterns among tasks
The most common patterns to look for