The experts say that you should do usability testing early and often. Tree testing is no different – indeed, it was created to let you test very early (before you even have a website coded) and very often (because it’s both cheap and easy to run a tree test).

In general, you can start testing as soon as you have a structure to test – either a text dump of your existing site’s IA, or the new IA ideas you’ve been playing with. You’ll also need time to create “find it” tasks that exercise your structure(s), and time for the overhead of setting up the tree tests.

Here’s a sample timeline that we use when we plan tree tests for clients:

• 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 you did in the first round – the only thing that needs more work is the tree structure itself.

For more on timelines, see Documenting your plan in Chapter 4.

Next: Where will you test?