The experts say that we should do usability testing early and often. Tree testing is no different – indeed, it was created to let us test very early (before we even have a website coded) and very often (because it’s both cheap and easy to run a tree test).
In general, we can start testing as soon as we have a structure to test – either a text dump of our existing site’s IA, or the new IA ideas we’ve been playing with. We’ll also need time to create “find it” tasks that exercise our structure(s), and time for the overhead of setting up the tree tests.
Here’s a sample timeline for planning tree tests:
- table showing high-level schedule
Note that most of the effort comes in preparing the first test. That’s because subsequent iterations largely reuse what we did in the first round – the only thing that needs more work is the tree structure itself.
For more on timelines, see Documenting our plan in Chapter 4.
Next: Which tool will we use?