Posing questions about tree elements

When we are roughing out draft trees, and later when we fill out the candidate trees we’ve chosen to test, questions and ideas naturally pop up. We may encounter thoughts like these:

Should we combine “Doctors” and “Nurses” into a single section? Could we call that “Medical”?
Should we list all 12 topics, or just the 6 main ones plus a ‘More’ link?
Should we call that section “Electronics” or “Technology”?
Will our audiences know what “Contingency planning” means?
…and dozens more like these.

Some of these thoughts may make us stop and rough out a new tree immediately to see if it’s worth considering. That’s good, because it’s still early days and we should keep entertaining fresh ideas as they happen.

Some questions will persuade us to test specific alternatives using our candidate trees. For example, we might decide to name a section “Electronics” in tree 1, and “Technology” in tree 2, and see which performs better in our testing.

Finally, some questions will suggest tasks that we should pose to users in our tree tests. We wondered if users would understand “Contingency planning”, so we should write a task that asks them to find a topic in that section (e.g. how to prepare for an earthquake).

As these questions and ideas surface, it’s a good idea to keep a running list of them so we can address them (either by discussing and discarding them, or by incorporating them into our trees or the tasks we will pose to users during testing).

Next: More on creating trees