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Tree testing 0:50
A 50-second explainer of Tree testing, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.
Try the interactive Tree testing demo
What this video covers
Tree testing checks whether people can find things in your site's structure, stripped of all visual design. You give them a text-only outline of the navigation and a task - "where would you go to do X?" - and watch which path they take. It isolates one question: is the information architecture itself findable, or is good design papering over a confusing structure?
With no colours, icons or search to lean on - just the bare labels - finding the task suddenly depended entirely on whether the categories made sense. That's the point: tree testing exposes the structure on its own. If people get lost here, no amount of visual polish later will truly fix it; it just hides the wrong turns.
