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Finding Your Areas of Findability

The document discusses measuring findability and navigation on a website. It provides tips for identifying areas of low findability through search logs, analytics, customer feedback and testing. The key part of testing involves replicating the website structure in a tree test and having users attempt to locate specific items or information. Their success rates, time taken and difficulty ratings are analyzed to identify areas for improvement such as reorganizing categories, adding cross-links between related products or rephrasing searches. Conducting a follow up test after changes can measure whether findability was enhanced.

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RAGOS Jeffrey Miguel P.
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96 views6 pages

Finding Your Areas of Findability

The document discusses measuring findability and navigation on a website. It provides tips for identifying areas of low findability through search logs, analytics, customer feedback and testing. The key part of testing involves replicating the website structure in a tree test and having users attempt to locate specific items or information. Their success rates, time taken and difficulty ratings are analyzed to identify areas for improvement such as reorganizing categories, adding cross-links between related products or rephrasing searches. Conducting a follow up test after changes can measure whether findability was enhanced.

Uploaded by

RAGOS Jeffrey Miguel P.
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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CHAPTER 15

MEASURING FINDABILITY AND NAVIGATION

FINDING YOUR AREAS OF FINDABILITY

Findability is the percent of items that a customer can find successfully, how quickly items

are found, and how much difficulty customers have in locating an item.

SEARCH BOXES

Search functions are vital to visitors finding what they want.

CATEGORIES

If you categorize your items and label each category appropriately, then visitors can find

what they’re looking for.

BREADCRUMB LINKS

Breadcrumb links are useful navigation tools so visitors don’t get lost in your website

SUGGESTED ITEMS

If you already know a customer is interested in a product, based on a search term or past

browsing (or buying) history

IDENTIFYING WHAT CUSTOMERS WANT

The first step in understanding findability is to know what your customers are looking for.

If you have a diverse customer base, you need to identify a target segment and persona to use for

your findability study.


SEARCH LOGS

See what users are searching for on the website’s internal search function.

YOUR WEBSITE ANALYTICS PROGRAM

Analytics programs like Google Analytics provide key words and traffic logs to see which

pages are most visited and what external search words customers are using.

PURCHASE RECORDS

Products that are purchased more frequently will have the most traffic, and even small

improvements in findability can result in substantially higher revenue.

COMMENTS AND COMPLAINTS

An easy place to find problems with your categorization system is to see if customers have

complained about not being able to locate items.

YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMERS

Ask customers to pick their top five products or things they look for when browsing or

purchasing.

NEW AND KNOWN ISSUES

Sometimes you’ll know that items can’t be found. In other cases, you have a new product

that you’ll want to know if customers can find.

PREPPING FOR A FINDABILITY TEST

Before you can launch your findability study, you have to do some things to prepare for it.
FINDING YOUR BASELINE

You need to find what your existing findability rate is, baseline findability, for items before

you start making changes.

DESIGNING THE STUDY

For electronic product searches (websites, software, mobile apps), the best way to test

findability is to replicate your existing navigation structure into a tree test.

THE FOLLOWING STEPS SHOW YOU HOW TO CONDUCT A TREE TEST USING

USERZOOM

1. REPLICATE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION STRUCTURE

2. ADD THE ITEMS YOU WANT TO TEST, AND THE SEARCH TERMS VISITORS

TYPICALLY USE TO FIND THOSE ITEMS

3. IDENTIFY THE CORRECT PATHS USER SHOULD TAKE TO FIND EACH ITEM

LOOKING AT YOUR FINDABILITY METRICS

Before you launch your findability study, you need to know which data UserZoom collects

for your baseline metrics.

FINDABILITY

Your key metric is findability or findability rate; whether the customer successfully finds

the product or piece of information successfully.

TIME TO FIND
If you ask users to locate an item, they assume the item can be found. Otherwise, why

would you ask them?

TASK DIFFICULTY

If you ask participants how easy or difficult it was to locate the item after they finish

looking for it.

OPEN-ENDED RESPONSES

If participants rate an item as relatively difficult to locate, you can ask them to describe in

their own words the problem they encountered.

CARD SORTING

If you want to test how clear your category labels, ask participants to sort your items into

their own categories and then label them.

CONDUCTING YOUR FINDABILITY STUDY

When you have tree test set up the way you want it, you an add profile and demographic

questions to the beginning or end of your study.

DETERMINE SAMPLE SIZE

The ideal sample size for running a baseline findability study is based on identifying the

tolerable margin of error around the estimate.


RECRUITING USERS

You need to find qualified participants who represent your customer base, and then have

them attempt to locate items. Generally, you can find customers to participate in a findability study

in three places:

• Customer lists

• Panel agencies

• Website intercepts

ANALYZING THE RESULTS

With the data collected, summarize the findability metrics by task: findability, task

difficulty, and task time.

1. Calculate the findability rate as your first (or gateway) metric.

2. Examine how difficult it was to find the item by looking at the average score to the

difficulty question.

3. Calculate the median time to find the item.

IMPROVING FINDABILITY

Here’s how to dissect the information gleaned from your tree-testing software:

1. Look for items that were hardest to find.

2. Look for items that were rated more difficult (even if they were found).

3. Look for items where users took too long to locate


4. Examine the open-ended responses participants provided to see why items are difficult to

find.

CROSS LINKING PRODUCT

Cross-linking is especially useful for websites and software where you don’t need to

physically place items.

REGROUPING CATEGORIES

One of the biggest problems you might have with findability is the category names you use.

REPHRASING THE TASKS

Sometimes, low findability rates can be caused by participants not fully understanding what

they are looking for.

MEASURING FINDABILITY AFTER CHANGES

Now it’s time to find out whether the changes you’ve made to your navigation actually

improve the findability and navigation of your website.

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