The tasks we create should cover the most common and critical activities that visitors will do at our website, and any “suspect” areas of our tree.
We can “borrow” tasks from any previous card sorting or usability testing that we’ve done for this site.
Create as many tasks as you need to cover the key parts of your tree, but don’t ask a given participant more than 8-10 tasks.
Decide if you need different tasks (and therefore separate tests) for different audiences, or if they can all “reasonably pretend” to do each other’s tasks.
Avoid the most common tree-testing pitfall by using our guidelines to write clear, effective tasks.
Be careful and consistent in marking your correct answers, because there may be more than you expected.
In most cases, you should let participants skip (give up on) tasks to avoid user frustration and pollution of your results.
Next: Chapter 8: Setting up a test