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The time, effort, money, and participants it will take to develop your our site tree depends partly on how many rounds of testing you’re we’re intending to do. More rounds usually means a better result (as you we would expect), but there are also diminishing returns to consider.
In Putting it all together in Chapter 3, we recommended a "full fat" process with 3 rounds of testing:
| Round 1 | Test the existing tree (baseline) |
|---|---|
| Round 2 | Test 2-3 new tree candidates |
| Round 3 | Revise/retest the best tree (often a hybrid) |
Because of budget or time constraints, this is often cut down to 2 rounds:
| Round 1 | Test the existing tree (baseline) and 2-3 new trees |
|---|---|
| Round 2 | Revise/retest the best tree (often a hybrid) |
The first round of testing shows you us where your our tree is doing well (yay!) and where it needs more work. So you we make some thoughtful revisions. Careful, though, because even if the problems you we found seem to have obvious solutions, you we still need to make sure your our revisions actually work for users, and don’t cause further problems.
The good news is, it’s dead easy to run a second test, because it’s just a small revision of the first one. You We already have the tasks and all the other bits worked out, so it’s just a matter of making a copy of the test (in whatever tool you’re we’re using), pasting in your our revised tree, and hooking up the correct answers. In an hour or two, you’re we’re ready to pilot it again (to err is human, remember) and then send it off to a fresh batch of participants.
There are two possible outcomes here:
- Your Our fixes are spot-on, the participants find the correct answers more frequently and easily, and your our overall score climbs. You We could have skipped this second test, but confirming that your our changes worked is both good practice and a good feeling. It’s also something concrete to show your the boss.
- Some of your our fixes didn’t work, or (given the tangled nature of IA work) they worked for the problems you saw in round 1, but now they’ve caused more problems of their own. Bad news, for sure, but better that you we uncover them now in the design phase (when it takes a few days to revise and retest) instead of further down the track when the IA has been signed off and changes become painful.
Note that Round 1 combines the “before” and “after” testing, because most of our clients have a good idea of where the weaknesses are in their existing tree. If you we don’t, we recommend the full 3-round approach described above is recommended; this can be combined with an open card sort to help generate ideas for the revised structure.
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For planning, this means that you we need to:
- add the desired # of rounds into your our project schedule
- determine how you we will get enough fresh participants for each round
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Next: Which trees will you we test?