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• A sentence or two describing the study (mainly for those who were not close to it).
  
  
• Bullet lists (or a table) of concisely worded findings and actions
  
  
• A sentence or two outlining what happens next
  
  
• Links to fuller results (results from our online testing tools, more detailed findings, tree spreadsheets, etc.)
  
  
• An invitation for people with more questions/comments/suggestions to contact youus.
  
  

Note that this summary should be in the body of the email, readable without having to open an attachment or click a link. We must make it as easy as possible for email skimmers (that means most of our audience) to get the gist of the results without any extra effort.

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If you we tested a single site tree, you we may find it useful to group your our findings by:

• Items/ideas that worked well
  
  
• Items/ideas that didn’t work well
  
  
• What will happen next
  
  

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If you we tested several site trees (well done!), you we may find it better to group your our findings by tree, to keep from confusing your our readers:

Subject:  tree tests - round 1 - summary of results

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Hi team,

This week, we ran online tree tests of two new proposed structures for our website, to see if site visitors could find typical items by browsing the headings and subheadings.

We got a pretty good turn-out of existing customers and non-customers, and a clear winner to use as the skeleton of our site redesign:

	Tree 0 (existing site)	Tree 1 (task-based)	Tree 2 (audience-based)
# of Customers	87	91	81
# of non-customers	92	75	65
Success rate	44%	61%	74%

What worked well

Tree 1 (task-based)	Tree 2 (audience-based)
My Account and About Us were clear, with all participants easily finding relevant items there and not visiting those sections otherwise.	My Account was clear.
The Downloads page in the Support section was found by most participants looking for our latest software patches.	The Downloads page (moved to the top level) was found by ALL participants.

What needs work

Tree 1 (task-based)	Tree 2 (audience-based)
The separate Products and Solutions sections were still confused by both user groups, as they were in the original site.	The unified Solutions page performed well, attracting the right clicks from both user groups.
Non-customers confused the SuperWidget product page with our Widget Packs and went to those pages instead.	Moving the Pack pages under their corresponding products increased the success rate of the product tasks.

Next steps

• Susan will run a follow-up tree test combining a revision of Tree 2 with the best elements of Tree 1.
  
• Lloyd will start updating content for a Tree-2-based site.
  

Full data and analysis

• The tree test data and more detailed results are at http://acme.com/studies/tree-test-2016-01-15

As always, contact me if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or ideas for future studies!

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