Dealing with shortcuts and duplicated content

How should you represent content that appears in more than one place in your tree?

For example, suppose you have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for a product, and that FAQ page is available from both the Products section and the Support section, like this:

• Products
  • Wizzo-matic
    • Features
    • FAQ
• Support
  • Downloads
  • FAQs
    • Wizzo-matic FAQ
      
      

It could be that this FAQ page is actually duplicated – each section has a separate page with the same content. Or (and this seems to be more common), there is only one actual FAQ page (say, the one in the Support section), and the one in the Products section is just a link to it.

In the tree you’re going to test, do you include the FAQ topic in both sections, or do you remove the one in Products because it’s not a “real” content page?

In general, we recommend including both entries in your tree, because even if the Product-FAQ link just links to the Support section, it’s still a choice that you give the user when they go to the Wizzo-matic product page. If you didn’t include the Product-FAQ topic in your tree, you would be withholding information from the test participant that a visitor to the real site would have.

Later, when you analyse the results, you will definitely want to see if participants took the Products-FAQ path or the Support-FAQ path. If you see that 90% of them go first to the Products section for the FAQ, that suggests that the FAQ should move to live there, and the Support-FAQ topic should just be a link to it.

If you choose not to include both entries in your tree, you can still check the results to see which path the participants took. If a sizable fraction of them went to the section without the FAQ topic, that suggests that you should at least include a cross-link there when you design the real site.

What if the duplicated content is not just a single topic (like the FAQ page above), but an entire subtree of topics? Should you duplicate the entire subtree for testing?

For example, suppose we have a My Account section in our site, which lets users create an account, log into that account, and see a my-account FAQ. It “lives” in the Support section, but we’ve also added a shortcut in the main navigation bar (a utility link in the upper right of the header):

~ss of site header, with Support section showing My Account in level-2 nav, and My Account utility link showing dropdown menu.

Here’s how we might represent this in a text tree:

• Products
• Support
  • My account
    • Sign up
    • Login
    • FAQ
• Downloads
• About us
• My account
  • Sign up
  • Login
  • FAQ

Notice that My Account appears twice in the tree, because it appears in two places in the global navigation.

Again, in general, we recommend including both subtrees in your test, because that’s what the user would see in the real site.

The only time you may not want to duplicate subtrees is if the subtree is very large, and it becomes tedious to keep both instances in sync as you develop the tree. In that case, you may want to prune the duplicate that you think is going to get less traffic during the test.