Navigating UX with Tree Testing: A Guide to Smarter Information Architecture

By Philip Burgess – UX Research Leader

When users visit a website or app, they’re often on a mission—whether it’s finding a product, accessing support, or learning something new. If your navigation structure isn’t intuitive, users get lost, frustrated, and leave. That’s where Tree Testing comes in: a UX research method that helps you evaluate and refine your site’s information architecture before design even begins.

What Is Tree Testing?

Tree Testing is a usability technique used to assess the findability of topics in a website or app’s hierarchy. It strips away visual design and focuses purely on the structure of content—the “tree”—to see how easily users can locate information.

Instead of clicking through a live site, participants are given a simplified text version of the site’s hierarchy and asked to complete tasks by selecting where they think the information lives.

Why Use Tree Testing?

Tree Testing is especially useful when:

• You're redesigning a site’s navigation or menu structure

• You want to validate a new IA before wireframing

• You’re merging content from multiple sources and need clarity

• You suspect users are struggling to find key information

It helps answer questions like:

• Are labels clear and intuitive?

• Is content grouped logically?

• Do users consistently find what they’re looking for?

How Tree Testing Works

Here’s a typical process:

1. Build the Tree   Create a simplified, text-only version of your site’s hierarchy—just categories and subcategories.

2. Write Tasks   Develop realistic scenarios like: “Where would you go to update your billing information?”

3. Run the Test   Use tools like Optimal Workshop’s Treejack or UXtweak to present the tree and tasks to participants.

4. Analyze Results   Look at success rates, directness (how many steps it took), and where users went wrong. This reveals structural weaknesses and confusing labels.

What You Learn

Tree Testing gives you:

• Success rates: % of users who found the correct location

• Path analysis: how users navigated the tree

• Misclicks: common wrong turns that indicate confusion

• Label clarity: which terms resonate and which don’t

Best Practices

• Keep tasks short and realistic

• Use a diverse participant pool

• Test early—before visual design

• Iterate based on findings

Tree Testing in Action

Imagine you're designing a university website. You want students to easily find course registration info. You run a tree test and discover that many users look under “Academics” instead of “Student Services.” That insight helps you restructure the menu or rename categories to match user expectations.

Final Thoughts

Tree Testing is a low-cost, high-impact way to ensure your site’s structure makes sense to real users. By validating your IA early, you save time, reduce redesigns, and create a smoother experience from the ground up.

Want help designing a tree test or interpreting results? I’d be happy to walk through it with you.