September 26, 2024
25 min

67 ways to use Optimal for user research

User research and design can be tough in this fast-moving world. Sometimes we can get so wrapped up in what we’re doing, or what we think we’re supposed to be doing, that we don’t take the time to look for other options and other ways to use the tools we already know and love. I’ve compiled this list over last few days (my brain hurts) by talking to a few customers and a few people around the office. I’m sure it's far from comprehensive. I’ve focused on quick wins and unique examples. I’ll start off with some obvious ones, and we’ll get a little more abstract, or niche, as we go. I hope you get some ideas flying as you read through, enjoy!

#1 Benchmark your information architecture (IA)

Without a baseline for your information architecture, you can’t easily tell if any changes you make have a positive effect. If you haven’t done so, benchmark your existing website on Tree testing now. Upload your site structure and get results the same day. Now you’ll have IA scores to beat each month. Easy.

#2 Find out precisely where people get lost

Use Tree testing Pietree to find out exactly where people are getting lost in your website structure and where they go instead. You can also use First-click testing for this if you’re only interested in the first click, and let’s face it, that is where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck.

#3 Start at the start

If you’re just not sure where to begin then take a screenshot of your homepage, or any page that you think might have some issues and get going with First-click testing. Write up a string of things that people might want to do when they find themselves on this page and use these as your tasks. Surprise all your colleagues with a maddening heatmap showing where people actually clicked in response to your tasks. Now you’ll know have a better idea of which area of your site to focus a tree test or card sort on for your next step.

#4 A/B test your site structure

Tree testing is great for testing more than one content structure. It’s easy to run two separate Tree testing studies, even more than two. It’ll help you decide which structure you and your team should run with, and it won’t take you long to set them up. Learn more.

#5 Make collaborative design decisions

Use Optimal Sort to get your team involved and let their feedback feed your designs: logos, icons, banners, images, the list goes on. By creating a closed image sort with categories where your team can group designs based on their preferences, you can get some quick feedback to help you figure out where you should focus your efforts.

#6 Do your (market) research

Card sorting is a great UX research technique, but it can also be a fun way to involve your users in some market research. Get a better sense of what your users and customers actually want to see on your website, by conducting an image sort of potential products. By providing categories like ‘I would buy this’, ‘I wouldn’t buy this’ to indicate their preferences for each item, you can figure out what types of products appeal to your customers.

#7 Customer satisfaction surveys with surveys

The thoughts and feelings of your users are always important. A simple survey can help you take a deeper look at your checkout process, a recently launched product or service, or even on the packaging your product arrives in, your options are endless.


#8 Crowdsource content ideas

Whether you’re running a blog or a UX conference, Questions can help you generate content ideas and understand any knowledge gaps that might be out there. Figure out what your users and attendees like to read on your blog, or what they want to hear about at your event, and let this feed into what you offer.

#9 Do some sociological research

Using card sorting for sociological research is a great way to deepen your understanding of how different groups may categorize information. Rather than focusing solely on how your users interact with your product or service, consider broadening your research horizons to understand your audience’s mental models. For example, by looking at how young people group popular social media platforms, you can understand the relationships between them, and identify where your product may fit in the mix.

#10 Create tests to fit in your onboarding process

Onboarding new customers is crucial to keeping them engaged with your product, especially if it involves your users learning how to use it. You can set up a quick study to help your users stay on track with onboarding. For example, say your company provided online email marketing software. You can set up a First-click testing study using a photo of your app, with a task asking your participants where they’d click to see the open rates for a particular email that went out.


#11 Quantify the return on investment of UX

Some people, including UX Agony Aunt, define return on UX as time saved, money made, and people engaged. By attaching a value to the time spent completing tasks, or to successful completion of tasks, you can approximate an ROI or at least illustrate the difference between two options.


#12 Collate all your user testing notes using qualitative Insights

Making sense of your notes from qualitative research activities can be simultaneously exciting and overwhelming. It’s fun being out on the field and jotting down observations on a notepad, or sitting in on user interviews and documenting observations into a spreadsheet. You can now easily import all your user research and give it some traceability.


#13 Establish which tags or filters people consider to be the most important

Create a card sort with your search filters or tags as labels, and have participants rank them according to how important they consider them to be. Analytics can tell you half of the story (where people actually click), so the card sort can give another side: a better idea of what people actually think or want.

#14 Reduce content on landing pages to what people access regularly

Before you run an open card sort to generate new category ideas, you can run a closed card sort to find out if you have any redundant content. Say you wanted to simplify the homepage of your intranet. You can ask participants to sort cards (containing homepage links) based on how often they use them. You could compare this card sort data with analytics from your intranet and see if people’s actual behavior and perception are well aligned.

#15 Crowd-source the values you want your team/brand/product to represent

Card sorting is a well-established technique in the ‘company values’ realm, and there are some great resources online to help you and your team brainstorm the values you represent. These ‘in-person’ brainstorm sessions are great, and you can run a remote closed card sort to support your findings. And if you want feedback from more than a small group of people (if your company has, say, more than 15 staff) you can run a remote closed card sort on its own. Use Microsoft’s Reaction Card Method as card inspiration.

#16 Input your learnings and observations from a UX conference with qualitative insights

If you're lucky enough to attend a UX conference, you can now share the experience with your colleagues. You can easily jot down ideas quotes and key takeaways in a Reframer project and keep your notes organized by using a new session for each presenter Bonus, if you’re part of a team, they can watch the live feed rolling into Reframer!


#17 Find out what actions people take across time

Use card sorting to understand when your participants are most likely to perform certain activities over the course of a day, week, or over the space of a year. Create categories that represent time, for example, ‘January to March’, ‘April to June’, ‘July to September’, and ‘October to December’, and ask your participants to sort activities according to the time they are most likely to do them (go on vacation, do their taxes, make big purchases, and so on). While there may be more arduous and more accurate methods for gathering this data, sometimes you need quick insights to help you make the right decisions.


#18 Gather quantitative data on prioritizing project tasks or product features

Closed card sorting can give you data that you might usually gather in team meetings or in Post-its on the wall, or that you might get through support channels. You can model your method on other prioritization techniques, including Eisenhower’s Decision Matrix, for example.

#19 Test your FAQs page with new users

Your support and knowledge base within your website can be just as important as any other core action on your website. If your support site is lacking in navigation and UX, this will no doubt increase support tickets and resources. Make sure your online support section is up to scratch. Here’s an article on how to do it quickly.

#20 Figure out if your icons need labels

Figure out if your icons are doing their job by testing whether your users are understanding them as intended. Uploading icons you currently use, or plan to use in your interface to First-click testing, and ask your users to identify their meaning by making use of post-task questions.

#21 Give your users some handy quick tools

In some cases, users may use your website with very specific goals in mind. Giving your users access to quick toos as soon as they land on your website is a great way to ensure they are able to get what they need done easily. Look at your analytics for things people do often that take several clicks to find, and check whether they can find your ‘quick tool’ in a single click using First-click testing.

#22 Benchmark the IA of your competition

We all have some sort of competitors, and researchers also need to pay attention to what they get up too. Make life easy in your reporting by benchmarking their IA and then reviewing it each quarter for the board and leaders to be wowed with. Also, not a perfect comparison, as users and separate sites have different flows, but compare your success scores with theirs. Makes your work feel like the Olympics with the healthy competition going on.

#23 Improve website conversions

Make the marketing team’s day by doing a fast improvement on some core conversions on your website. Now, there are loads of ways to improve conversions for a check out cart or signup form, but using First-click testing to test out ideas before you start going live A/B test can take mere minutes and give your B version a confidence boost.

#24 Reduce the bounce rates of certain sections of your website

People jumping off your website and not continuing their experience is something (depending on the landing page) everyone tries to improve. The metric ‘time on site’ and ‘average page views’ is a metric that shows the value your whole website has to offer. Again, there are many different ways to do this, but one big reason for people jumping off the website is not being able to find what they’re looking for. That’s where our IA toolkit comes in.

#25 Test your website’s IA in different countries

No, you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to go to all these countries to test, although that’d be pretty sweet. You can remotely research participants from all over the world, using our integrated recruitment panel. Start seeing how different cultures, languages, and countries interact with your website.

#26 Run an empathy test (card sort)

Empathy – the ability to understand and share the experience of another person – is central to the design process. An empathy test is another great tool to use in the design phase because it enables you to find out if you are creating the right kind of feelings with your user. Take your design and show it to users. Provide them with a variety of words that could represent the design – for example “minimalistic”, “dynamic”, or “professional” – and ask them to pick out which the words which they think are best suited to their experience.

#27 Test visual hierarchy with first-click testing

Use first-click testing to understand which elements draw users' attention first on your page. Upload your design and ask participants to click on the most important element, or what catches their eye first. The resulting heatmap will show you if your visual hierarchy is working as intended - are users clicking where you expect them to? This technique helps validate design decisions about sizing, color, positioning, and contrast without needing to build the actual page.

#28 Take Qualitative Insights into the field

Get out of the office or the lab and observe social behaviour in the field. Use Qualitative Insights to input your observations on your field research. Then head back to your office to start making sense of the data in the Theme Builder.

#29 Use heatmaps to get the first impressions of designs

Heatmaps in our First-click testing tool are a great way of getting first impressions of any design. You can see where people clicked (correctly and incorrectly), giving you insights on what works and doesn’t work with your designs. Because it’s so fast to test, you can iterate until your designs start singing.

#30 Multivariate testing

Multivariate testing is when more than two versions of your studies are compared and allows you to understand which version performs better with your audience. Use multivariate testing with Tree testing and First-click testing to find the right design on which to focus and iterate.

#31 Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) with tree testing

Yes, a good IA improves your SEO. Search engines want to know how your users navigate throughout your site. Make sure people can easily find what they’re looking for, and you’ll start to see improvement in your search engine ranking.

#32 Test your mobile information architecture

As more and more people are using their smartphones for apps and to browse sites, you need to ensure its design gives your users a great experience. Test the IA of your mobile site to ensure people aren’t getting lost in the mobile version of your site. If you haven’t got a mobile-friendly design yet, now’s the time to start designing it!

#33 Run an Easter egg hunt using the correct areas in first-click testing

Liven up the workday by creating a fun Easter egg hunt in first-click testing. Simply upload a photo (like those really hard “spot the X” photos), set the correct area of your target, then send out your study with participant identifiers enabled. You can also send these out as competitions and have closing rules based on time, number of participants, or both.

#34 Keystroke level modeling

When interface efficiency is important you'll want to measure how much a new design can improve task times. You can actually estimate time saved (or lost) using some well-tested approaches that are based on average human performance for typical computer-based operations like clicking, pointing and typing. Read more about measuring task times without users.

#35 Feature prioritization and get some help for your roadmap

Find out what people think are the most important next steps for your team. Set up a card sort and ask people to categorize items and rank them in descending order of importance or impact on their work. This can also help you gauge their thoughts on potential new features for your site, and for bonus points compare team responses with customer responses.

#36 Tame your blog

Get the tags and categories in your blog under control to make life easier for your readers. Set up a card sort and use all your tags and categories as card labels. Either use your existing ones or test a fresh set of new tags and categories.

#37 Test your home button

Would an icon or text link work better for navigating to your home page? Before you go ahead and make changes to your site, you can find out by setting up a first-click testing test.

#38 Validate the designs in your head

As designers, you’ve probably got umpteen designs floating around in your head at any one time. But which of these are really worth pursuing? Figure this out by using The Optimal Workshop Suite to test out wireframes of new designs before putting any more work into them.

#39 ‘Buy now’ button shopping cart visibility

If you’re running an e-commerce site, ease of use and a great user experience are crucial. To see if your shopping cart and checkout processes are as good as they can be, run a first-click test.

#40 IA periodic health checks

Raise the visibility of good IA by running periodic IA health checks using Tree testing and reporting the results. Management loves metrics and catching any issues early is good too!

#41 Focus groups with qualitative insights

Thinking of launching a new product, app or website, or seeking opinions on an existing one? Focus groups can provide you with a lot of candid information that may help get your project off the ground. They’re also dangerous because they’re susceptible to groupthink, design by committee, and tunnel vision. Use with caution, but if you do then use with Qualitative Insights! Compare notes and find patterns across sessions. Pay attention to emotional triggers.

#42 Gather opinions with surveys

Whether you want the opinions of your users or from members of your team, you can set up a quick and simple survey using Surveys. It’s super useful for getting opinions on new ideas (consider it almost like a mini-focus group), or even for brainstorming with teammates.

#43 Design a style guide with card sorting

Style guides (for design and content) can take a lot of time and effort to create, especially when you need to get the guide proofed by various people in your company. To speed this up, simply create a card sort to find out what your guide should consist of. Find out the specifics in this article.

#44 Improve your company's CRM system

As your company grows, oftentimes your CRM can become riddled with outdated information and turn into a giant mess, especially if you deal with a lot of customers every day. To help clear this up, you can use card sorting and tree testing to solve navigational issues and get rid of redundant features. Learn more.

#45 Sort your life out

Let your creativity run wild, and get your team or family involved in organizing or prioritizing the things that matter. And the possibilities really are endless. Organize a long list of DIY projects, or ask the broader team how the functional pods should be re-organized. It’s up to you. How can card sorting help you in your work and daily life?

#46 Create an online diary study

Whether it’s a product, app or website, finding out the long-term behaviour and thoughts of your users is important. That’s where diary studies come in. For those new to this concept, diary studies are a longitudinal research method, aimed at collecting insights about a participant’s needs and behaviors. Participants note down activities as they’re using a particular product, app, or website. Add your participants into a qualitative study and allow them to create their diary study with ease.

#47 Source-specific data with an online survey

Online survey tools can complement your existing research by sourcing specific information from your participants. For example, if you need to find out more about how your participants use social media, which sites they use, and on which devices, you can do it all through a simple survey questionnaire. Additionally, if you need to identify usage patterns, device preferences or get information on what other products/websites your users are aware of/are using, a questionnaire is the ticket.

#48 Guerrilla testing with First-click testing

For really quick first-click testing, take First-click testing on a tablet, mobile device or laptop to a local coffee shop. Ask people standing in line if they’d like to take part in your super quick test in exchange for a cup of joe. Easy!

#50 Ask post-task questions for tree testing and first-click testing

You can now set specific task-related questions for both Tree testing and First-click testing. This is a great way to dive deeper into the mushy minds of your participants. Check out how to use this new(ish) feature here!

#51 Start testing prototypes

Paper prototypes are great, but what happens when your users are scattered around the globe, and you can’t invite them to an in-person test? By scanning (or taking a photo) of your paper prototypes, you can use first-click testingto test them with your users quickly and easily. Read more about our approach here.

#52 Take better notes for sense making

Qualitative research involves a lot of note-taking. So naturally, to be better at this method, improving how you take notes is important. Reframer is designed to make note-taking easy but it can still be an art. Learn more.

#53 Make sure you get the user's first-click right

Like most things, read a little, and then it’s all about practice.We’ve found that people who get the first click correct are almost three times as likely to complete a task successfully. Get your first clicks right in tree testing and first-click testing and you’ll start seeing your customers smile.


#54 Run a cat survey. Yep, cats!

We’ve gained some insight into how people intuitively group cats, and so can you (unless you’re a dog person). Honestly, doing something silly can be a useful way to introduce your team to a new method on a Friday afternoon. Remember to distribute the results!


#55 Destroy evil attractors in your tree

Evil attractors are those labels in your IA that attract unjustified clicks across tasks. This usually means the chosen label is ambiguous, or possibly a catch-all phrase like ‘Resources’. Read how to quickly identify evil attractors in the Destinations table of tree test results and how to fix them.

#56 Affinity map using card sorts

We all love our Post-its and sticking things on walls. But sometimes you need something quicker and accessible for people in remote areas. Try out using Card Sorts for a distributed approach to making sense of all the notes. Plus, you can easily import any qualitative insights when creating cards in card sort. Easy.

#57 Preference test with first-click testing

Whether you’re coming up with a new logo design, headline, featured image, or anything, you can preference test it with First-click testing. Create an image that shows the two designs side by side and upload it to First-click testing. From there, you can ask people to click whichever one they prefer!

#58 Add moderated card sort results to your card sort

An excellent way of gathering valuable qualitative insights alongside the results of your remote card sorts is to run a moderated version of the sorts with a smaller group of participants. When you can observe and interact with your participants as they complete the sort, you’ll be able to ask questions and learn more about their mental models and the reasons why they have categorized things in a particular way. Learn more.

#59 Test search box variations with first-click clicking

Case study by Viget: “One of the most heavily used features of the website is its keyword search, so we wanted to make absolutely certain that our redesigned search box didn’t make search harder for users to find and use.”

#60 Run an image card sort to organize products into groups

You can add images to each card that allows you understand how your participants may organize and label particular items. Very useful if you want to organize some retail products and want to find out how other people would organize them given a visual including shape, color, and other potential context.

#61 Test your customers' perceptions of different logo and brand image designs

Understand how customers perceive your brand by creating a closed card sort. Come up with a list of categories, and ask participants to sort images such as logos, and branded images.

#62 Run an open image card sort to classify images into groups based on the emotions they elicit

Are these pictures exhilarating, or terrifying? Are they humoros, or offensive? Relaxing, or boring? Productive, or frantic? Happy memories, or a deep sigh?

#63 Run an image card sort to organize your library

Whether it’s a physical library of books, or a digital drive full of ebooks, you can run a card sort to help organize them in a way that makes sense. Will it be by genre, author name, color or topic? Send out the study to your coworkers to get their input! You can also do this at home for your own personal library, and you can include music/CDs/vinyl records and movies!

#64 HR exercises to determine the motivations of your team

It’s simple to ask your team about their thoughts, feelings, and motivations with a Questions survey. You can choose to leave participant identifiers blank (so responses are anonymous), or you can ask for a name/email address. As a bonus, you can set up a calendar reminder to send out a new survey in the next quarter. Duplicate the survey and send it out again!

#65 Designing physical environments

If your company has a physical environment in which your customers visit, you can research new structures using a mixture of tools in The Optimal Workshop Suite. This especially comes in handy if your customers require certain information within the physical environment in order to make decisions. For example, picture a retail store. Are all the signs clear and communicate the right information? Are people overwhelmed by the physical environment?

#66 Use tree testing to refine an interactive phone menu system

Similar to how you’d design an IA, you can create a tree test to design an automated phone system. Whether you’re designing from the ground up, or improving your existing system, you will be able to find out if people are getting lost.


#67 Have your research team categorize and prioritize all these ideas

Before you dig deeper into more of these ideas, ask the rest of the team to help you decide which one to focus on. Let’s not get in the way of your work. Start your quick wins and log into your account. Here’s a spreadsheet of this list to upload to card sort. Aaaaaaaaaaand that’s a wrap! *Takes out gym towel and wipes sweaty face.
*Got any more suggestions to add to this list? We’d love to hear them in our comments section — we might even add them into this list

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1 min read

How to Spot and Destroy Evil Attractors in Your Tree (Part 1)

Usability guru Jared Spool has written extensively about the 'scent of information'. This term describes how users are always 'on the hunt' through a site, click by click, to find the content they’re looking for. Tree testing helps you deliver a strong scent by improving organisation (how you group your headings and subheadings) and labelling (what you call each of them).

Anyone who’s seen a spy film knows there are always false scents and red herrings to lead the hero astray. And anyone who’s run a few tree tests has probably seen the same thing — headings and labels that lure participants to the wrong answer. We call these 'evil attractors'.In Part 1 of this article, we’ll look at what evil attractors are, how to spot them at the answer end of your tree, and how to fix them. In Part 2, we’ll look at how to spot them in the higher levels of your tree.

The false scent — what it looks like in practice

One of my favourite examples of an evil attractor comes from a tree test we ran for consumer.org.nz, a New Zealand consumer-review website (similar to Consumer Reports in the USA). Their site listed a wide range of consumer products in a tree several levels deep, and they wanted to try out a few ideas to make things easier to find as the site grew bigger.We ran the tests and got some useful answers, but we also noticed there was one particular subheading (Home > Appliances > Personal) that got clicks from participants looking for very different things — mobile phones, vacuum cleaners, home-theatre systems, and so on:

pic1

The website intended the Personal appliance category to be for products like electric shavers and curling irons. But apparently, Personal meant many things to our participants: they also went there for 'personal' items like mobile phones and cordless drills that actually lived somewhere else.This is the false scent — the heading that attracts clicks when it shouldn’t, leading participants astray. Hence this definition: an evil attractor is a heading that draws unwanted traffic across several unrelated tasks.

Evil attractors lead your users astray

Attracting clicks isn’t a bad thing in itself. After all, that’s what a good heading does — it attracts clicks for the content it contains (and discourages clicks for everything else). Evil attractors, on the other hand, attract clicks for things they shouldn’t. These attractors lure users down the wrong path, and when users find themselves in the wrong place they'll either back up and try elsewhere (if they’re patient) or give up (if they’re not). Because these attractor topics are magnets for the user’s attention, they make it less likely that your user will get to the place you intended. The other evil part of these attractors is the way they hide in the shadows. Most of the time, they don’t get the lion’s share of traffic for a given task. Instead, they’ll poach 5–10% of the responses, luring away a fraction of users who might otherwise have found the right answer.

Find evil attractors easily in your data

The easiest attractors to spot are those at the answer end of your tree (where participants ended up for each task). If we can look across tasks for similar wrong answers, then we can see which of these might be evil attractors.In your Treejack results, the Destinations tab lets you do just that. Here’s more of the consumer.org.nz example:

Pic2

Normally, when you look at this view, you’re looking down a column for big hits and misses for a specific task. To look for evil attractors, however, you’re looking for patterns across rows. In other words, you’re looking horizontally, not vertically. If we do that here, we immediately notice the row for Personal (highlighted yellow). See all those hits along the row? Those hits indicate an attractor — steady traffic across many tasks that seem to have little in common. But remember, traffic alone is not enough. We’re looking for unwanted traffic across unrelated tasks. Do we see that here? Well, it looks like the tasks (about cameras, drills, laptops, vacuums, and so on) are not that closely related. We wouldn’t expect users to go to the same topic for each of these. And the answer they chose, Personal, certainly doesn’t seem to be the destination we intended. While we could rationalise why they chose this answer, it is definitely unwanted from an IA perspective. So yes, in this case, we seem to have caught an evil attractor red-handed. Here’s a heading that’s getting steady traffic where it shouldn’t.

Evil attractors are usually the result of ambiguity

It’s usually quite simple to figure out why an item in your tree is an evil attractor. In almost all cases, it’s because the item is vague or ambiguous — a word or phrase that could mean different things to different people. Look at our example above. In the context of a consumer-review site, Personal is too general to be a good heading. It could mean products you wear, or carry, or use in the bathroom, or a number of things. So, when those participants come along clutching a task, and they see Personal, a few of them think 'That looks like it might be what I’m looking for', and they go that way.Individually, those choices may be defensible, but as an information architect, are you really going to group mobile phones with vacuum cleaners? The 'personal' link between them is tenuous at best.

Destroy evil attractors by being specific

Just as it’s easy to see why most attractors attract, it’s usually easy to fix them. Evil attractors trade in vagueness and ambiguity, so the obvious remedy is to make those headings more concrete and specific. In the consumer-site example, we looked at the actual content under the Personal heading. It turned out to be items like shavers, curling irons, and hair dryers. A quick discussion yielded Personal care as a promising replacement — one that should deter people looking for mobile phones and jewellery and the like.In the second round of tree testing, among the other changes we made to the tree, we replaced Personal with Personal Care. A few days later, the results confirmed our thinking. Our former evil attractor was no longer luring participants away from the correct answers:

Pic3

Testing once is good, testing twice is magic

This brings up a final point about tree testing (and about any kind of user testing, really): you need to iterate your testing —  once is not enough.The first round of testing shows you where your tree is doing well (yay!) and where it needs more work so you can make some thoughtful revisions. Be careful though. Even if the problems you found seem to have obvious solutions, you still need to make sure your revisions actually work for users, and don’t cause further problems. The good news is, it’s dead easy to run a second test, because it’s just a small revision of the first. You already have the tasks and all the other bits worked out, so it’s just a matter of making a copy in Treejack, pasting in your revised tree, and hooking up the correct answers. In an hour or two, you’re ready to pilot it again (to err is human, remember) and send it off to a fresh batch of participants.

Two possible outcomes await.

  • Your fixes are spot-on, the participants find the correct answers more frequently and easily, and your overall score climbs. You could have skipped this second test, but confirming that your changes worked is both good practice and a good feeling. It’s also something concrete to show your boss.
  • Some of your fixes didn’t work, or (given the tangled nature of IA work) they worked for the problems you saw in Round 1, but now they’ve caused more problems of their own. Bad news, for sure. But better that you uncover them now in the design phase (when it takes a few days to revise and re-test) instead of further down the track when the IA has been signed off and changes become painful.

Stay tuned for more on evil attractors

In Part 1, we’ve covered what evil attractors are and how to spot them at the answer end of your tree: that is, evil attractors that participants chose as their destination when performing tasks. Hopefully, a future version of Treejack will be able to highlight these attractors to make your analysis that much easier.

In Part 2, we’ll look at how to spot evil attractors in the intermediate levels of your tree, where they lure participants into a section of the site that you didn’t intend. These are harder to spot, but we’ll see if we can ferret them out.Let us know if you've caught any evil attractors red-handed in your projects.

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1 min read

How to get started with tree testing 🌱

Are your visitors really getting the most out of your website? Tree testing (or sometimes referred to as reverse card sorting) takes away the guesswork by telling you how easily, or not, people can find information on your website. Discover why Treejack is the tool of choice for website architects.

What’s tree testing and why does it matter? 🌲 👀

Whether you’re building a website from scratch or improving an existing website, tree testing helps you design your website architecture with confidence. How? Tools like Treejack use analysis to help assess how findable your content is for people visiting your website. 

It helps answer burning questions  like:

  • Do my labels make sense?
  • Is my content grouped logically?
  • Can people find what they want easily and quickly?  If not, why not?

Treejack provides invaluable intel for any Information Architect. Why? Knowing where and why people get lost trying to find your content, gives you a much better chance of fixing the actual problem. And the more easily people can find what they’re looking for, the better their experience which is ultimately better for everyone.

How’s tree testing work? 🌲🌳🌿

Tree testing can be broken down into two main parts: 

  • The Tree - Your tree is essentially your site map – a text-only version of your website structure.
  • The Task - Your task is the activity you ask participants to complete by clicking through your tree and choosing the information they think is right. Tools like Treejack analyse the data generated from doing the task to build a picture of how people actually navigated your content in order to try and achieve your task.  It tells you if they got it right or wrong, the path they took and the time it took them.

Whether you’re new to tree testing or already a convert, effective tree testing using Treejack has some key steps.

Step 1.  The ‘ Why’:  Purpose and goals of tree testing

Ask yourself what part of your information architecture needs improvement – is it your whole website or just parts of it? Also think about your audience, they’re the ones you’re trying to improve the website for so the more you know about their needs the better. 

Tip:  Make the most of what tree testing offers to improve your website by building it into your overall design project plan

Step 2.  The ‘How’:   Build your tree

You can build your tree using two main approaches: 

  • Create your tree in spreadsheet and import it into Treejack or
  • Build your tree in Treejack itself, using the labels and structure of your website.

Tip:  Your category labels are known as ‘parent nodes’. Your information labels are known as ‘child nodes’.

Step 3. The ‘What’: Write your tasks

The quality of your tasks will be reflected in the usefulness of your data so it’s worth making sure you create tasks that really test what you want to improve.

Tip:  Use plain language that feels natural and try to write your tasks in a way that reflects the way people who visit your website might actually think when they are trying to find information on your site.

Step 4.  The ‘Who’:  Recruit participants

The quality of your data will largely depend on the quality of your participants. You want people who are as close to your target audience as possible and with the right attitude - willing and committed to being involved.

Tip:  Consider offering some kind of incentive to participants – it shows you value their involvement.

Step 5.  The ‘insights’: Interpret your results

Now for the fun part – making sense of the results. Treejack presents the data from your tree testing as a series of tables and visualizations. You can download them in a spreadsheet in their raw format or customized to your needs.

Tip:  Use the results to gain quick, practical insights you can act on right away or as a starter to dive deeper into the data.

When should I use tree testing? ⌛

Tree testing is useful whenever you want to find out if your website content is labelled and organised in a way that’s easy to understand.  What’s more it can be applied for any website, big (10+ levels with 10000s of labels) or small (3 levels and 22 labels) and any size in between.  Our advice for using Treejack is simply this: test big, test small, test often.

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Which comes first: card sorting or tree testing?

“Dear Optimal Workshop,I want to test the structure of a university website (well certain sections anyway). My gut instinct is that it's pretty 'broken'. Lots of sections feel like they're in the wrong place. I want to test my hypotheses before proposing a new structure. I'm definitely going to do some card sorting, and was planning a mixture of online and offline. My question is about when to bring in tree testing. Should I do this first to test the existing IA? Or is card sorting sufficient? I do intend to tree test my new proposed IA in order to validate it, but is it worth doing it upfront too?" — Matt

Dear Matt,

Ah, the classic chicken or the egg scenario: Which should come first — tree testing or card sorting?

It’s a question that many researchers often ask themselves, but I’m here to help clear the air!You should always use both methods when changing up your information architecture (IA) in order to capture the most information.

Tree testing and card sorting, when used together, can give you fantastic insight into the way your users interact with your site. First of all, I’ll run through some of the benefits of each testing method.

What is card sorting and why should I use it?

Card sorting is a great method to gauge the way in which your users organize the content on your site. It helps you figure out which things go together and which things don’t. There are two main types of card sorting: open and closed.

Closed card sorting involves providing participants with pre-defined categories into which they sort their cards. For example, you might be reorganizing the categories for your online clothing store for women. Your cards would have all the names of your products (e.g., “socks”, “skirts” and “singlets”) and you also provide the categories (e.g.,“outerwear”, “tops” and “bottoms”).

Open card sorting involves providing participants with cards and leaving them to organize the content in a way that makes sense to them. It’s the opposite to closed card sorting, in that participants dictate the categories themselves and also label them. This means you’d provide them with the cards only — no categories.

Card sorting, whether open or closed, is very user focused. It involves a lot of thought, input, and evaluation from each participant, helping you to form the structure of your new IA.

What is tree testing and why should I use it?

Tree testing is a fantastic way to determine how your users are navigating your site and how they’re finding information. Your site is organised into a tree structure, sorted into topics and subtopics, and participants are provided with some tasks that they need to perform. The results will show you how your participants performed those tasks, if they were successful or unsuccessful, and which route they took to complete the tasks. This data is extremely useful for creating a new and improved IA.

Tree testing is an activity that requires participants to seek information, which is quite the contrast to card sorting — an activity that requires participants to sort and organize information. Each activity requires users to behave in different ways, so each method will give its own valuable results.

Should you run a card or tree test first?

In this scenario, I’d recommend running a tree test first in order to find out how your existing IA currently performs. You said your gut instinct is telling you that your existing IA is pretty “broken”, but it’s good to have the data that proves this and shows you where your users get lost.

An initial tree test will give you a benchmark to work with — after all, how will you know your shiny, new IA is performing better if you don’t have any stats to compare it with? Your results from your first tree test will also show you which parts of your current IA are the biggest pain points and from there you can work on fixing them. Make sure you keep these tasks on hand — you’ll need them later!

Once your initial tree test is done, you can start your card sort, based on the results from your tree test. Here, I recommend conducting an open card sort so you can understand how your users organize the content in a way that makes sense to them. This will also show you the language your participants use to name categories, which will help you when you’re creating your new IA.

Finally, once your card sort is done you can conduct another tree test on your new, proposed IA. By using the same (or very similar) tasks from your initial tree test, you will be able to see that any changes in the results can be directly attributed to your new and improved IA.

Once your test has concluded, you can use this data to compare the performance from the tree test for your original information architecture — hopefully it is much better now!

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