Primetime for tree testing is early in the design phase, once we’ve done enough research to feel we have a good handle on our audiences, their background, and their needs.

We start creating drafts of new site structures immediately after we finish a content audit – that is, after we decide which content we will be adding, updating, or deleting. While content is always a moving target, it really helps to have most of it identified before trying to design a structure for it.

This work on content and structure can be done in parallel with conceptual design, but usually comes before more detailed work such as page layouts, fine-grained interactions, and visual design.

From our research, we should have several ideas about what to change (and what not to) in a new site tree – not just grouping, but labeling too.

We can then start sketching out new trees by looking at these ideas and our list of planned content. It’s typical to rough out 2-5 different trees at this stage, down to level 2 or level 3, just to explore how they might work. We might do this ourselves, or (even better) we might involve the whole team to get a wider variety of informed ideas.

For more on creating trees, see Chapter 5 - Creating trees.

Going wide and going deep

In the design phase, we can increase the quality of our site tree by doing two critical things:

• Going wide (testing several alternative trees at the start)
  
  
• Going deep (testing and revising down to a single tree that performs well)
  
  

The next two sections describe each of these approaches in more detail.

Next: The design phase: going wide