How to optimise your website navigation with Tree Testing

It’s a sad fact that users are on our beloved websites for less and less time, and are increasingly impatient if they don’t find the content they need quickly.

Modern browsing experiences are fragmented, interrupted and spread across multiple devices. On mobile, in particular, the average session duration is just 72 seconds, with desktop at around 150 seconds; both offering too brief a window to guide people to the context and content they are seeking.

It’s never been more important to invest time in optimising your website navigation structure. Get this right and you can be confident that your users are engaging with your precious content, and being guided to your key services in the brief time you have with them.

How to uncover real insight

At DEPT®, we analyse and benchmark website architecture before testing and validating a new proposed structure, based on clear rationale. We like to remove the guesswork, and enable a framework that provides clear evidence and analysis to inform refinements.

To do this, we use Tree Testing – a usability technique for evaluating the findability of topics in a website. Simply put, it provides a way to measure how well users can find items in a hierarchy, based on setting mini-tasks to find content.

How to implement Tree Testing

We use TreeJack to conduct Tree Testing studies, which is part of the Optimal Workshop suite of tools.

There are four key steps to undertaking the perfect website navigation Tree Test:

DEPT®’s experience design

DEPT®’s team of highly experienced UX experts and experience designers specialise in creating sites which fully support both user and business goals.  Contact us to discuss how we can optimise your website.