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The experts say that you we should do usability testing early and often. Tree testing is no different – indeed, it was created to let you us test very early (before you we even have a website coded) and very often (because it’s both cheap and easy to run a tree test).

In general, you we can start testing as soon as you we have a structure to test – either a text dump of your our existing site’s IA, or the new IA ideas you’ve we’ve been playing with. You’ll We’ll also need time to create “find it” tasks that exercise your our structure(s), and time for the overhead of setting up the tree tests.

Here’s a sample timeline that we use when we plan tree tests for clients:

•  table showing high-level schedule

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Note that most of the effort comes in preparing the first test. That’s because subsequent iterations largely reuse what you did in the first round – the only thing that needs more work is the tree structure itself.

For more on timelines, see Documenting your plan in Chapter 4typical high-level timeline for 3 rounds of tree testing (testing the existing tree, testing our new trees, then testing our even-better-with-revisions “final” tree):

If we’re just planning 1 or 2 rounds of testing, it should be easy to take this and cut it down to what is needed.

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Next: Where will you test Which tool will we use?