This was a first at Weedmaps. I've had experience conducting these tests before so I was able to share some learnings with team and eventually provide enough rationale to get stakeholder buy-in. I mention this because it required a bit of patience and advocacy to adopt this tool, as with most things research. Once that hurdle had been crossed we were up and running.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF NAVIGATION AT WEEDMAPS
Weedmaps has been around for 10+ years and during that time it has created new surfaces (pages) to satisfy user needs. This meant we had very similar labels in our navigation that directed folks to the same place, just filtered differently. I'm not going to say redundancy is always a bad thing, a lot of navigations have success with poly-parenting of items, but that's usually at the subcategory level and not at the top of the hierarchy, so I had my concerns.

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COLLECTING A BASELINE
In my experience, writing unbiased and non-leading tasks are both the hardest part to this method and the easiest to get wrong. I leaned on SME's within the org across different functions to help draft tasks for the test. Afterward, I paired down the list of tasks based on stakeholder feedback and would be ready to launch the test.

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I would then release the first test to 50 participants. The sample size was larger since this is a quantitative method. The larger sample size also helped with the initial skepticism some folks had for this method.

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The baseline test highlighted what we all kinda knew but never really knew how to quantify. We now had a clearer sense of which labels were causing the most confusion and could move to make a proposal.

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The team at WM has a very sophisticated data stack and I would only be scratching the surface of it. My goal was to go wide and look for anything that supported the confusion observed in the tree test.

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PROJECTING TRAFFIC DISTRIBUTION
The new proposed tree would be doing just this, but what would that actually mean for the business? I set out to try and understand the implications of redistributing traffic from one destination on the site to the other. I partnered with data to check my logic and ended up using a simple formula of:
% change in traffic = current nav clicks + (% change in tree test * current nav clicks)

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IDENTIFYING A BIG BET
This was a great conversation starter and reminder of how valuable wayfinding is. I would share these insights in various meetings and channels until we aligned on a path forward. That path forward would be consolidation of certain pages. This was the "big bet" and would require several more months of planning before we could test.

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MOVING ON A SMALL WIN
The consolidation effort wouldn't yield any returns for awhile since folks had to align on a few business goals before making a decision. I was still eager to demonstrate how valuable navigation can be and proposed a smaller quicker experiment. There was one point of data that stuck out to me.
This seemed very odd given that mobile sees about 90% of our traffic volume (9m-11m) and desktop only accounts for about 10% of traffic volume. Yet both had around 600k in navigation engagements per month. This suggested to me that navigation was valuable when exposed and not hidden away in a hamburger menu.