How to create the tasks your participants will complete
Create tasks that represent the typical tasks your users need to complete when they visit your website. Type your task into the label text field.
If you need your participants to complete all of the tasks outlined in your study, simply uncheck the ‘Allow participants to skip tasks’ checkbox on the right hand side. You can randomize the task order for your participants.
You can also customize the text on the selected answer button that's provided to your participants. If you use the default text and set your study to another language, this text will be automatically translated. However, if you choose to customize this text, it won't be automatically translated.
How to select the correct destination
When you click the button 'Correct destination', your entire tree will appear in a pop up box, with checkboxes next to each label. You can use the search box to find the correct label. Click the check box on the label that completes the task, and then click 'Save'. You can also select multiple labels as a correct answer for your task if you need to.
Why you can't select parent nodes as correct destinations
At the moment, Optimal's tree testing doesn't allow you to mark a parent node as a correct destination. Even if your tree testing software allowed you to, marking parent nodes as correct isn't always a good idea. This is because in your results you want to see the actual path your participants took to arrive at their destination.
It's difficult to follow this down to lower levels if the parent node is the correct destination, as you won't be able to see their entire path! This simplifies the experience for your participants and the results you analyze. Furthermore, you won't learn a lot if all your correct destinations were parent nodes.
Often, not all answers in the subtree are correct, so marking the parent as correct is sloppy.
Here's a couple of suggestions for what to do if you want select a parent node as the correct destination because:
every node underneath it could be correct
the page contains the answer but it has child nodes.
Everything in the category is correct
If it's because the node and any child of that node is correct, then one solution is to simply remove all child nodes from that node in your tree. For the purposes of your testing, the path ends at that node.
As an example, consider a product taxonomy for an auction site like eBay. If you set a task to find golf clubs, and you decide the category "Golf" is the correct answer, there is no need to further include "Drivers" and "Irons" etc. as child nodes.
Alternatively, you could get more specific with your tasks, and ask participants to find a five iron.
The page contains the destination but it has child nodes
This is usually because the node represents a landing page of some kind linking to further content on other pages, and it is this page which contains the content you consider the correct destination for a task. Because it has children, it can't be selected as the correct destination for a task. The solution is to explicitly include the piece of content you consider the destination as a leaf child of the "header" node in the tree.
As an example, if we use a fictional website and the site map looks like this:
Contact
But the structure of the content is actually:
But now you can't select "Wellington office" as a correct destination. This is because when you add children to "Wellington office", it no longer reflects a piece of content, but instead a container for content. To better reflect how the content is structured, you could build the tree like this: