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Primetime for tree testing is early in the design phase, once we’ve done enough research to feel we have a good handle on our audiences, their background, and their needs.

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This work on content and structure can be done in parallel with conceptual design, but usually comes before more detailed work such as page layouts, fine-grained interactions, and visual design.

Creating new trees

From our research, we should have several ideas about what to change (and what not to) in a new site tree – not just grouping, but labeling labelling too.

We can then start sketching out new trees by looking at these ideas and our list of planned content. It’s typical to rough out 2-5 different trees at this stage, down to level 2 or level 3, just to explore how they might work. We might do this ourselves, or (even better) we might involve the whole team to get a wider variety of informed ideas.

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In the design phase, we can increase the quality of our site tree by doing two critical things:

• Going wide (testing several alternative trees at the start)

• Going deep (testing and revising down to a single tree that performs well)

The next two sections describe each of these approaches in more detail.

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