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.
