How Good Is Your Site Navigation?
How easy is it for your visitors to use your navigation and find what they are looking for? Do you get complaints from users that they can’t find what they are looking for on your site? Have you tested the findability of items in your navigation structure (often called taxonomy) with real users? If not then you might want to consider a usability technique known as tree testing or reverse card sorting. This can significantly reduce problems with your navigation.
What is Tree Testing?
Tree testing evaluates the findability, labelling and organization of topics on a website. Most websites are organised into a hierarchy (a “tree”) of topics and subtopics. Tree testing is a way of identifying how easy it is for users to find individual items in this hierarchy.
However, unlike normal usability testing, tree testing is not carried out on the website itself, but instead users browse a simplified text version of the site structure. This removes the effects of the design, including visual cues, and navigational aids (e.g the internal search box) and other factors that might influence how quickly visitors find what they are looking for.
How Does Tree Testing work?
There are 6 steps to complete a tree test:
- Users are given a find it task to complete (e.g. “find a portable DVD players for less than £20).
- Participants are shown a text list of the top-level topics of the website.
- Users select a heading, and then are given a list of the subtopics to choose from.
- Participants continue choosing topics in the tree, and can backtrack if necessary, until they find a topic that achieves their aim or they may abandon the process if they can’t find what are looking for.
- Users will then repeat the process a number of times with different find it tasks to test the findability of a range of items in the tree hierarchy.
- Test results will then be analysed once a sufficient number of users have completed the test.
When Should You Use Tree Testing?
If you want to identify the root cause of navigation problems tree testing may be the best solution because it removes the effect of the design of your website and other navigational tools and aids from the equation. With no internal search to assist your user tree testing helps to isolate navigational deficiencies so that you can make the necessary improvements in your taxonomy. Tree testing is often used for:
- Identify which items, groups or labels are causing problems for your users and set a benchmark of “findability” before you update your navigation. This might then lead you to conduct a card sorting exercise to improve the usability of your taxonomy.
- Measure the impact of a proposed improvement or implemented change in the findability of items in your navigation structure. This will allow you to validate if the change you are making helps improve findability, makes no difference or actually creates a new problem.
Which Elements should You Test?
For a small website with less than a hundred items you may be able to test your whole navigational structure. However, for large ecommerce websites with literally thousands of items on the site this is not practical or cost effective. In this instance you should use your web analytics to identify less common paths that can be removed from the testing process.
To decide what to test you should start by defining user’s goals and the top tasks that they need to accomplish to meet their goals. This normally involves getting both users and stakeholders to rank the main tasks so that you can identify what both groups agree on and also identify any low priority tasks that internal stakeholders wrongly believe are important to users. It may also be useful to include some items that cross departments as these create their own issues for users and items that have been identified as problematic from open card sorting or Voice of Customer research.
What Sample Size Do You Need?
As Steve Krug points out, “Testing one user is 100% better than testing none.” Whilst this is true, we have to bear in mind that with tree testing we may be dealing with a complex navigation structure and that it is important to conduct a reasonably robust test if we are to draw any reliable conclusions. The key outcome metric should be whether the user successfully found the item they were asked to locate and so this simplifies the analysis to a “Yes/No” metric.
I have outlined below the sample size required to achieve a confidence level of 95% and assumed 50% of users find the item. I have assumed 50% of users find the item because 50% generates the highest possible margin of error and so is the worst case scenario.
Generally you should limit the number of tests each participant completes to 10 depending upon how long on average each task takes to complete. Otherwise participants may become fatigued and they will also become e experienced users of your site structure which could influence the test results.
Should You Ask Participants Questions?
After each tree test it is useful to ask participants to rate the difficulty of the task. This can provide a guide to the usability of finding the item. Keep questions to a minimum but understanding how users perceive a task can add context to the test data. It can be useful for instance to compare task completion data with survey answers to identify any items where user perception does not align with task completion as this could highlight areas of particular concern.
Tree Testing Solutions:
Tree testing may not be one of the most well-known forms of usability testing, but it certainly offers the potential to help organisations resolve problems with their navigation structure. If you want to investigate tree testing further you can check out these solutions:
- Treejack from Optimal Workshop: One of the leaders in web-based usability testing for information architecture, Treejack is a popular solution for evaluating website navigation without the normal visual distractions.
- Usability Sciences: Offers a web-based solution and will analyse the findings to determine the effectiveness of your site structure. They will provide specific recommendations on changes to your labels, structure and placement of content within your navigation hierarchy.
- UserZoom: Provides a web-based service to identify navigational issues early in the design process. UserZoom will analyse any attempts where participants have trouble navigating to ensure this is resolved before your site goes live. It will also give you a measure how well users can find items in your hierarchy.
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- About the author: Neal provides digital optimisation consultancy services and has worked for brands such as Deezer.com, Foxybingo.com, Very.co.uk and partypoker.com. He identifies areas for improvement using a combination of approaches including web analytics, heuristic analysis, customer journey mapping, usability testing, and Voice of Customer feedback. By aligning each stage of the customer journey with the organisation’s business goals this helps to improve conversion rates and revenues significantly as almost all websites benefit from a review of customer touch points and user journeys.
- Neal has had articles published on website optimisation on Usabilla.com and as an ex-research and insight manager on the GreenBook Blog research website. If you wish to contact Neal please send an email to neal.cole@outlook.com. You can follow Neal on Twitter @northresearch and view his LinkedIn profile.
