After looking at the results of individual tasks, and across related tasks, it’s also useful to look for patterns in specific branches of your tree.

For example, you may notice that the tasks that target the About Us part of your site are scoring well, while the tasks that take participants to the Support section are mostly failing.

Sometimes these location-specific patterns become clearer when you look at the whole tree across all tasks. Most tools provide a matrix view of your results, where the tree is down the left side, and the tasks are across the top. Each cell then represents a possible answer (right or wrong). Here’s an example from Treejack’s “Destination” spreadsheet:

• pic of Destinations view with right/wrong answers highlighted

As we scroll down through the tree, we can see clusters of answers.

If a section of the tree is performing well, we’ll often see clusters of correct answers (shown here in green):

• pic of cluster of correct answers

If, however, we see clusters of wrong answers in a section, it suggests that participants are having trouble with topics in that section, and you need to look more closely at those tasks to see if there’s a common factor you can identify (and fix):

• pic of cluster of wrong answers

Next: Analyzing by user group or other criteria