In most cases, we work with others – members of the project team, project owners and sponsors, clients, and vendors. While it’s important that we (as designers and information architects) clearly understand our tree-test results, it’s equally important that we clearly communicate these results to our colleagues and anyone else with a stake in the project.

If we’re working in a fast-paced environment (e.g. in an Agile team or a small organization), the simplest and fastest way to communicate results is an email summary of what we learned and what we do next. In our experience, most stakeholders will not read a long-form report attachment (no matter how lovingly we assembled it), but they will read (or at least skim) a short email of bullet items. Whether we end up writing a full report or not, sending an email summary first is always a good idea.

The summary should include the bare minimum needed to communicate the most important results of the study. This normally is limited to:

• A sentence or two describing the study (mainly for those who were not close to it).
  
  
• Bullet lists (or a table) of concisely worded findings and actions
  
  
• A sentence or two outlining what happens next
  
  
• Links to fuller results (results from our online testing tools, more detailed findings, tree spreadsheets, etc.)
  
  
• An invitation for people with more questions/comments/suggestions to contact you.
  
  

Note that this summary should be in the body of the email, readable without having to open an attachment or click a link. We must make it as easy as possible for email skimmers (that means most of our audience) to get the gist of the results without any extra effort.

If you tested a single site tree, you may find it useful to group your findings by:

• Items/ideas that worked well
  
  
• Items/ideas that didn’t work well
  
  
• What will happen next
  
  

Subject:  tree tests - round 1 - summary of results

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Hi team,

This week, we ran an online tree test of our existing website, to see if site visitors could find typical items by browsing the headings and subheadings. 87 customers and 92 non-customers participated.

What worked well

• My Account and About Us were clear, with all participants easily finding relevant items there and not visiting those sections otherwise.
• The Downloads page in the Support section was easily found by participants looking for our latest software patches.
  

What needs work

• The separate Products and Solutions sections were continually confused by both user groups.
• Existing customers found the SuperWidget product page easily, but non-customers confused it with our Widget Packs and went to those pages instead.
• The What's New page (where we list our upcoming events) was not found by most participants looking for the next webinar.
• The FAQ page attracted heavy (and unwanted) traffic even for basic product information.

Next steps

•  

• set of bullets for each tree, color-coded green and red
  
  

If you tested several site trees (good for you), you may find it better to group your findings by tree, to keep from confusing your readers:

• ss of summary for several trees

Next: Reporting in more depth