Chapter 4 - key points

A bit of planning up front will save us time, effort, and frustration later.

We can use tree testing to get a baseline score for an existing website, test revisions to an existing structure, or make new structures compete against each other and the original site.

We should plan to test our entire structure unless it’s large (> 500 items), in which case we can test a pruned version of it.

Early on, we’ll need to determine which audiences to target, how we will reach them, and what incentive (if any) we’ll offer them.

We should start testing as soon as we have a structure written down.

Will we only test online, or will we need to supplement our results with some in-person sessions?

To run a good study, there are several roles to fill. Will we do them all ourselves, or do we need to involve other people?

If something goes wrong during testing, we need to plan how we will handle it.

Documenting our plan makes everything easier, especially if we have a template to start from.

 


Next: Chapter 5 - Creating trees

 


Copyright © 2016 Dave O'Brien

This guide is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.