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While either of these will work, we recommend using a spreadsheet instead, because:
- The separate columns make it easier to see which level a given heading is on, and to make sure we haven’t accidentally skipped a level.
- We can include several trees (e.g. the baseline tree and some revised versions) in a single spreadsheet by using the page tabs.
- Most importantly, we can add columns to annotate the tree. In the screenshot below, we’ve added columns for Tasks and Notes.
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However, if we’re collaborating with others, we highly recommend using a online spreadsheet (such as Google Sheets) that provides multi-user editing. This lets everyone stay current and contribute without having to email files around and manually consolidate changes later.
Here are sample files in Excel and Google Sheets formats 's an Excel template to get started. Feel free to tweak them to suit your needs:
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- sample file
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- sample file
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A few notes about our spreadsheet template:
- The first column is reserved for the root node of the tree, so it only has a single entry, typically labeled “Home” or “Top”, but we can rename it to whatever suits our site.
- We’ve included 5 2 levels, but add or remove columns as required.
- Each heading is on its own row. A common error is to start subheadings on the same row as the heading, but some tree-testing tools will get confused by this.
- The Task column lets us pencil in ideas for tasks we’d like to use to exercise a particular part of the tree. By writing tasks here in the tree, it also provides a quick way to check which parts of the tree we’re testing. For more on this, see Chapter 7 - Writing tasks.
- The Notes column gives us a place to jot down comments, issues, or to-do’s for later work. If a note is particularly important (e.g. we think it should be discussed at our next meeting), we color-code its cell to make it stand out.
- The Assigned to column tracks which team member is responsible for each section of the tree.
- We can add more columns as needed. For example, if we’re dividing up work with otherssome tasks may only apply to some user groups, we may want to add a Who an Audiences column to track who’s responsible for each section of the treethis.
For the remainder of this guide, we’ll use the spreadsheet method, although these ideas should be easy to adapt to other methods as well.
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