Treejack, test your IA
Treejack by Optimal Workshop offers a survey-tool to test your Information architecture. Getting feedback on the backbone of your website as early as possible is key for success and avoids unpleasant surprises at the end. Discovering that the Information Architecture you developed is not understood by your potential users after designing and developing your site causes much more trouble and costs than adjusting the IA before you start designing and developing.
How does it work?
- Create a new survey and a survey url that you can distribute to your participants. You can even ad a password if you only want invited users to participate.
- Then you can enter your tree, you can do this by copy-pasting from a spreadsheet or text document or by entering it directly into the text field. The copy-past function from excel (on a mac) does not work seamlessly but avoids a lot of typing. I still had to put my tabs/spaces wright. The preview function did not work since it only showed the first level. You can however go back easily to adjust your tree afterwards, so not really a big problem.
Tree set-up in Treejack
- Then you can enter search tasks for the test-participants, things like: “Find a coffee mug” or “Where is the article on swine flu”,…
- You can ad special settings like:
- randomize tasks and/or items in a tree branche
- show only a part of the tasks to each participant
- when results should be excluded
- If you are finished you can set your survey life and distribute the survey url.
Treejack seems a tool that suits the purpose of testing a information architecture early in a project.
