Information architecture
Information architecture questions test how people organize and find content — before or after you ship navigation, menus, or site structure.
These types sit under Information architecture in the content picker. Available in surveys, usability tests, and in-product surveys.
Card sorting
Section titled “Card sorting”What it is
Participants sort cards (labels, features, topics) into categories. In a closed sort you provide category names; in an open sort participants create their own groups.
Why choose it
Understand mental models for grouping — essential for IA workshops, menu design, and taxonomy projects.
Results you get
- Category placement and agreement between participants
- Similarity and cluster-style views in Results & Insights Studio
- Tables showing which cards landed together
Examples
| Study aim | Cards might be… |
|---|---|
| Navigation design | Home, Pricing, Support, Blog, Account |
| Feature grouping | Export, Share, Comment, Notify, Archive |
| Content taxonomy | Product types in an e-commerce catalogue |
Open vs closed
- Closed — faster analysis when categories are already hypothesised
- Open — discovery when you do not know the right group names yet
Tree test
Section titled “Tree test”What it is
Participants try to find an item by clicking through a hierarchical tree (like a sitemap or menu), without visual design — structure only.
Why choose it
Measure findability and label quality before expensive visual design or development.
Results you get
- Success rate per task
- Paths taken (direct success, indirect success, failure)
- First-click and destination summaries
- Task-level tables suited to fixing weak branches
Examples
| Task wording | What you learn |
|---|---|
| “Where would you find billing history?” | Whether ‘Account’ vs ‘Settings’ works |
| “Where is cancel subscription?” | If destructive actions are discoverable |
| “Find size guide for shoes” | Depth and naming in a retail tree |
Tree tests pair well with card sorting: sort to define groups, tree test to validate the resulting hierarchy.
Practical tips
Section titled “Practical tips”- Write tree tasks as realistic goals, not “click Settings”
- Keep trees focused — test one area of the site per study when possible
- Pilot task wording with a colleague before launch
- For multilingual studies, translate card labels and tree nodes on the translations page
Related
Section titled “Related”- Choice and modeling — when you need preference scores, not structure
- Interactive tasks — prototype-based findability in usability tests
- Results and Insights Studio