card-sort-tree-test
Skill1 starsChanged 37 days agoMITView on GitHub
Plan and analyse card sorting and tree testing to design or check information architecture and navigation. Use when someone is organising content, designing navigation or menus, renaming categories, or wants to know if people can find things.
In this repository17 other files it gives its agents.
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The file
We split this skill into the rules it gives an agent
1 rule. About 0 are common, 1 is distinctive, and 0 are very specific to this project.
≈0
Common · estimate
Many files like this have a rule of this kind.
≈1
Distinctive · estimate
This author's own choices. Worth a look.
0
Very specific
Tied to their project's names, files or tools. Probably skip.
- Common
- Distinctive
- Very specific
- Distinctive: line 30
Don't use your org chart as the tree.
≈ “Common” is an estimate: at least 1 in 5 of the 350,495 skill files we read have a rule of the same kind, not the same words. “Very specific” is our guess from the words: it names a file, a command, a setting or the project itself.
Files
Card sorting and tree testing
Card sorting shows how people group things. Tree testing shows whether they can find things in a structure. Use the first to build a navigation, the second to check it.
Card sort
- Cards: 30 to 60 real content items, written in plain language, no category hints in the names.
- Type: open (people make and name groups) to discover, closed (fixed groups) to check a proposal, hybrid for both.
- Participants: 15 to 30 for unmoderated sorts.
- Analysis: which cards are grouped together most often (a similarity matrix), the group names people use, and the cards that land everywhere (they need a clearer label or a second home).
Tree test
- Tree: the proposed navigation as text only, no design.
- Tasks: 8 to 10 "Where would you find..." tasks for important or tricky items, worded without the label's words.
- Participants: 30 to 50.
- Analysis per task: success rate, directness (got there without backtracking), first click, and where people went wrong.
Output
For a card sort: recommended groups and labels with the evidence. For a tree test: per task results, the problem areas, and specific label or structure changes, then what to re test.
Don't
- Don't use your org chart as the tree. Don't test labels with the words that appear in the task.
Does it work?
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