Analyzing by branches

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

For example, we may notice that the tasks that target the About Us part of our 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 we look at the whole tree across all tasks. Most tools provide a matrix view of our results, where the tree is down the left side, and the tasks are across the top. Each cell shows the number of participants who chose that answer for that task, color-coded as right or wrong. Here’s an example from Treejack’s Destination view:

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. For example, it appears that the Browse by section is working for participants:

If, however, we see clusters of wrong answers in a section, it suggests that participants are having trouble with topics in that section, and we need to look more closely at those tasks to see if there’s a common factor we can identify (and fix). Below, it's clear that the News & Events and Careers sections are attracting far too many unwanted clicks:

Next: Analyzing by user group or other criteria