...
Besides organization, the other IA element we're concentrating that tree tests focus on is labelling - the specific words we use in our headings.
When we run a tree test, we are seeing the interaction of these two factors:
| Organization | If a user can't navigate down to the right heading, it doesn't matter how hard we worked to make that heading clear. |
|---|---|
| Labelling | If a user doesn't understand a certain heading, they're unlikely to click on it to see its subheadings |
...
...but tree testing and usability testing showed that other audiences (such as businesses) also considered themselves to be "providers", causing some hesitation in choosing the right section.
Changing this label to "Medical Providers" solves that problem, but introduces another, because "Medical Providers" might be interpreted by patients as offering a list of medical providers to contact.
Using a term like "For Medical Providers" is unambiguousclearer, but alas, this may be too long for the space available - see Balance brevity with clarity below.
...
For example, the bus website mentioned above has an Information tab. If we asked 5 different people what that tab contained, we would likely get 5 different answers:
Writing a vague heading can also create an evil attractor - a link that lures clicks when we don't want it to.
In Discovering evil attractors in Chapter 12, we see that a consumer-review website tried a Personal subheading in their Appliance section. In tree testing, participants mistakenly chose it as the answer for a wide variety of unrelated tasks. When they made it more specific (changing Personal to Persona Care), the problem went away.
Make headings
...
quick to skim
It also helps to make headings easy to skim, by putting the most important differentiating words up front.
...