If a tree falls in the forest…: What tree-testing is and how we use it to understand our website visitors
From providers, journalists to members of the public and internal staff — the CQC website gets a huge amount of traffic every day. On average 1.2 million visitors per month, to be exact. People come to our website to meet a variety of different goals and whilst we have a lot of data, it’s not always possible to see whether users have been able to achieve what they’ve set out to. If someone leaves the website from a page, we still have a lot of questions. Why did they leave? Did they find what they were looking for? One of the methods that user researchers can use to understand this is Tree-testing.
What is tree-testing?
Tree-testing lets us understand if and how a user would reach a specific goal using the links of our website. To do this, a ‘tree’ needs to be built and tasks need to be set. The tree is a text-only version of the website structure where the hierarchy of links, or the branches, of a website can be mapped. After the structure is built, we must set research participants tasks, for example ‘You want to tell CQC about a positive experience you had at your dentist’ then set the ‘right’ answer which are the links to pages where the user could achieve their goal.
Once users have completed the tasks, we’re able to see how easy or difficult it was for these people to find what they were looking for. The key measures we have for tree-testing are directness (how direct the route the user chose was), success (whether they were able to complete the task) and time (how long it actually took them to complete it). We can see the branches they went down, whether they turned back and where they thought they’d be able to achieve their goal.
How I’ve been using tree-testing at CQC
I have been using tree-testing to understand how users navigate around the CQC website. As mentioned before, there are a lot of different user groups accessing our website for many different reasons and it’s important that users can find what they’re looking for and can do it without spending time clicking through various pages on our site.
I have been focusing on members of the public to understand where they would navigate to tell us about their experiences of care, to read inspection reports and to understand CQC’s role and it has helped us identify areas which require further investigation.
What we do with the results
As user researchers we understand that quantitative information only gets us so far to understanding our users.
Tree-testing doesn’t give us the context of a user’s behaviour which we would normally get from remote usability testing or ideally in-person research.
It does however help me identify areas to focus my attention on and inform my research plan. The results of my tree-test has helped me create hypotheses which will be tested with users through more contextual work. When a website has as much traffic as CQC’s it’s so important to prioritise, and conducting these tree-tests helps us to solve the biggest problems for users first.
