Tree Testing: Fast, Iterative Evaluation of Menu Labels and Categories

Summary: Follow these tips to effectively evaluate a site’s navigation hierarchy and to avoid common design mistakes.

Developing an effective navigation hierarchy is a challenge. Even when following best practices for understandable information architecture , you cannot be sure that your categorization and labeling choices will make sense to your users. As we often say at NN/g, if you’re not checking, you’re guessing ; you need to test your information architecture to be sure that your users will be able to find key resources and features.

This article discusses tree testing, a research method used to assess the findability of resources after you have created your proposed navigation hierarchy;

What Is Tree Testing?

Much like usability testing , tree testing  is a task-based research method where you ask participants to look for key resources.