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The smart thing to do here is “go wide” – that is, generate several different site trees to exercise our various ideas, then pick the 2 or 3 most promising trees to test against each other.
- diagram of 3 different trees
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This may seem like a lot of extra work, but it’s not. It turns out that trying to settle on a single tree at this stage is usually very difficult. There are different groupings to try, different terms to try, and (if we’re working with a team) diverging ideas from other members. We’ve found it easier to generate several trees that incorporate these inputs than it is to try hacking and slashing them all in a single structure.
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It brings to mind the advertising person who said that if they went away and worked and then came back with a single idea to pitch, they would be fired on the spot.
Going wide – an example
- WUD slides - Meridian
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For an example of testing alternative ideas, let's look at Meridian Energy, a renewable-power company that needed to redesign its site tree.
When they ran an open card sort with their users, the results suggested that the current top-level headings didn’t match their mental model.
So they brainstormed a bunch of ideas, and decided that two of them were worth testing. They set up three tree tests - the two ideas plus the current site.
When the results came back a week later, the current tree perform poorly (as they expected). But so did the two new ones:
Obviously, they were not happy about this. Time to start over, right?
Well, not really. When they dug deeper into the results, they found patterns in both trees that performed very well. The problem was that there were other patterns and potholes that sabotaged the overall scores.
So, in round 2, they created a third tree that was a hybrid of the best of the earlier designs. And the third tree proved to be the charm:
Going deep - Iterating until we get it right
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