Page Comparison

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When you’re we’re evaluating a site structure, one of the key things to get right is your our top-level navigation, also known as “level 1”. These are typically the headings that appear in your the global navigation, often as tabs across the top of the site:

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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.

It’s crucial to get your our top-level headings right:

• They are the front line of your our navigation.
  They appear on every page of your the site, so your users see them a lot. This is one of the main ways users build a mental model of your our content and how it’s organized.
  
  
• A correct first click can double the success rate.
  Bob Bailey's research on first clicks shows that if we can get users started in the right direction, they’re much more likely to find what they’re looking for.
  
  

An obvious way to test the effectiveness of your our top-level headings is to look at the clicks they made from the “home” node of your our tree. This includes two cases:

• The “first click” that your participants make when they start a task. If that first click is correct, their job becomes a lot easier, because they’re now looking for their answer in a much smaller tree (the subtree for the section they chose).
  
  
• Any subsequent clicks from the “home” node. These only happen if the participant chooses one top-level heading, later changes their mind, backtracks to the home node, and chooses a different top-level heading.
  
  

While you we can dive in and examine click paths to see where the top-level clicks are going, most tools provide an easier way to see this.

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