Once you’ve reviewed your tree, tweaked it, and decided that it’s ready for testing, it’s time to copy it from your spreadsheet into your tree-testing tool.
Just before you import your tree, it’s prudent to check for certain characters that may foul things up, namely:
Before importing, remove these offenders using the search/replace function of your spreadsheet app, searching for the leading blank or the line break (you may need to look up the character code for the latter) and replacing it with nothing.
Most online tree-testing tools make it easy to import your tree, either by:
In either case, the tool then parses your text into a tree of headings and subheadings.
Regardless of how you import your tree into the tool, be sure to check that nothing got lost in translation. In particular, watch for:
Some tree-testing tools offer the option to randomize the subtopics under a given parent topic.
For example, suppose that part of our tree looked like this:
If you chose the option to randomize subtopics, then during the tree test, each participant would see these subtopics in a random order:
Participant 1 sees… | Participant 2 sees… | Participant 3 sees… |
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The purpose of this option is to compensate for participants who tend to choose items near the top of the list without looking at items near the bottom. This tends to happen when the list is long (10 subtopics or more).
However, you should only randomize subtopics like this if both of the following are true:
These are unlikely criteria for most site structures, so we don’t recommend using the “randomize subtopics” option in most cases.
Don’t confuse “randomizing subtopics” (described above, and rarely used) with the “randomize tasks” option (described in How many tasks? in Chapter 7, and often used). |
Next: Chapter 6 - key points