How to conduct a tree test

Understanding findability in your product

👋🏻Hi, this is Nikki with a 🔒subscriber-only 🔒 article from User Research Academy. In every article, I cover in-depth topics on how to conduct user research, grow in your career, and fall in love with the craft of user research again.

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Have you ever gone to a website and tried desperately to find what you are looking for to no avail? You’ve gone through all the navigation headers and sub-headers, looked on search, and even tried cmd+F, but still, nothing is coming up.

How is it that such a simple task on a product can be so confusing? Let me help explain this.

The other day I went to Amazon to top up my monthly gift card. I learned this trick about a year ago to give myself an Amazon budget (it can get out of hand on a small island where you need stuff that just doesn’t exist in your area).

It had been a while since I added money to my gift card - originally, it was automatic, but I had switched cards, so it was no longer automatically getting money added.

I landed as I always do on this:

Now it was time to go through the ever-long process of remembering where to add money to my gift card.

Since I live in the UK, gift cards = vouchers, so I went to vouchers.

Imagine the sound of a buzzer — maybe the one from that game Taboo, if you’ve played it. Nope. Vouchers wasn’t where I parked my car.

Then I decided to go back to the long list of things I could do.

I sat and looked at this list for a while. Eventually I decided the smartest move for me would be to go into my payments area.

Woohoo — I had finally found my Amazon gift card (not voucher), and I clicked on it to find myself on another page!

And then finally I was able to get to the “top up” page!

Do you know the utter horror I felt when I saw the “Gift Cards & Top Up” that had followed me around, mocking me and my bad eyesight, tired Tuesday vibes, and age? It was terrible, BUT, I thought to myself, this is part of the user experience and if it took me this long to find it, would my dad ever have stood a chance?

How many clicks does it take til you get to the…

From the start to the end, it took me seven clicks (and a sad amount of time, like task failure amount of time) to reload my Amazon gift card balance. If I wasn’t dependent on Amazon or didn’t know from previous experience that I could do this, I might have given up.

Unfortunately for most companies, many customers aren’t so dependent on their products or services that they can risk something like this happening. If I try to find something and fail, I’m gone. I’m finding another product or service that’s easier.

And that’s where tree testing comes in.