Guides to testing navigation, designs and first impressions.
Practical, plain-English guides to planning studies, writing tasks and making sense of the results, whichever tool you use.
Guides
How to run a tree test, step by step
A practical guide to tree testing a website or app navigation, from building the tree and writing tasks to recruiting participants and reading the results.
Read the guide →Tree testingGuide · 3 min readHow to write good tree test tasks
The tasks make or break a tree test. Here's how to write realistic scenarios that test your navigation, not people's ability to match words, with examples.
Read the guide →Tree testingGuide · 3 min readHow to read tree test results
What success, directness, first click, time and pietrees tell you about your navigation, and how to turn tree test results into changes worth making.
Read the guide →First-click testingGuide · 3 min readFirst-click testing, explained
What first-click testing is, why the first click matters so much, and how to run a first-click test on a live page, mockup or wireframe.
Read the guide →Five-second testsGuide · 3 min readHow to run a five-second test
Use a five-second test to check first impressions: whether people understand what a page is for and remember the message that matters, with example questions.
Read the guide →Card sortingGuide · 3 min readHow to run a card sort
A practical guide to open, closed and hybrid card sorting. Choosing cards, how many people you need, and how to read an agreement matrix and dendrogram.
Read the guide →Preference testingGuide · 3 min readHow to run a preference test
Compare two or more designs and find out which people prefer, and why. How to set up a fair comparison, how many people you need, and how to tell a real winner from chance.
Read the guide →Articles
How many participants do you need for a tree test?
Why tree tests need more people than moderated usability tests, how to pick a number, and what to do when you have several user groups or a long task list.
Read the article →Research methodsArticle · 2 min readMeasuring ease and usability: SEQ and SUS explained
Two standard questionnaires for unmoderated testing. What the Single Ease Question and System Usability Scale measure, how they're scored, and what a good score looks like.
Read the article →