Our interactive decision tree tool is a must-have for any business looking to skyrocket their customer service through self-help, organizations hoping to logically deliver answers, and even contact centers to guide their customer-facing agents through how-tos and support.
No matter what you use Zingtree for, getting your first tree deployed can be daunting for some. So have no fear, here are our top tips for breaking into the awesomely helpful world of Zingtrees:
1. Sketch out a Roadmap
Remember in school when you’d sit down, brainstorm a strategy, and whip out the perfect outline for getting started? It’s just like that! Whether it’s in list, mind map, or spreadsheet form, getting down the touchstones you need your tree to cover before you start building your tree is crucial and will make building your nodes and connecting them in a flow much easier. Compiling an outline is essential and will make the creation much more streamlined.
2. Go with What’s Already Been Built
We’re continuously updating the decision tree examples present in our Gallery. Here you’ll find a huge variety of pre-made decision trees for various use cases and industry-specific needs that you can edit, adjust, and customize to fit your needs. 
Simply click the “Examine button to take a closer look, and the “Copy” button within that to create a replicated version that you can adjust as needed.
3. Use the Right Building Tool
We all know that there are different styles of learning, creating, coding and strategizing — for this reason, we’ve equipped Zingtree with a robust set of tools fit for everyone.
Visual Designer allows for a “white board” to create nodes, connections, and truly see the decision tree as it’s being built. Some Zingtree builders only use this mode as a way of aesthetically assembling decision trees.
Importing from spreadsheets lets you start the process in Excel or Google Sheets and then upload it all into Zingtree. A perfect solution for spreadsheet lovers!
The Wizard tool is ideal for anyone who likes simple question-and-answer style forms and will get you up-and-running after collecting some key information.
Learn more about how to create a decision tree using our methods here.
4. Use Placeholders When Undecided
When you’re on a roll mapping out your decision tree you’re bound to run into a speed bump here or there, especially when dealing with conditional node flows. In practice, this means if you need two nodes connected you need to create both nodes before you create the connection between them.
If you’re stumped on the additional nodes, we recommend that you create simple untitled/undefined nodes to help you continue through the process. You can always go back to that node and edit appropriately as needed.
5. Use Sub-Trees for More Complexities
If you know you’re going to have a large project ahead of you, prepare more than one Zingtree to ease the pain in constructing one whole decision tree. In fact, when you’re in the planning stages, you will find these sub-trees occur naturally in complex decision trees. By containing themes and varying elements in different trees, and then later, linking them up into one final tree using Tree Links, you can concentrate on one element at a time!
6. Go Back With Snapshots
A very helpful feature we’ve built into Zingtree is Snapshots. Snapshots allow you to review edits and go back to previous versions of your tree – helpful when creating trees with multiple revisions. To find this tool, select More Tools > Snapshots. You can see any other team members’ work and revisions, not to mention, recover that past version.
7. Try Logic Nodes for Test, Questionnaires & More
Moving from A-to-B as easily as possible is our most base-level goal. Going a bit deeper, however, many businesses, educators, and other types of users benefit from having logic steps involved to quickly jump end-users to where they need to be, collect values associated with each selection, and more.
Logic Nodes test the value of your Zingtree variables with a series of rules and jump to a node when a condition is met. The rules are applied in order, so once a rule condition is met, the node assigned to the rule opens next.
8. Customize and Personalize Away!
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again — customization is key. That’s why we make it easy to add in color and style wherever it’s needed! Need a pop of branded personality or just want to showcase your information in a visually-stunning way? No problem. With options to insert custom CSS files, adjust the appearance of buttons, and add videos, GIFs and other types of media, you can get as customized as you want.
We’d love to hear your tricks and tips for starting a Zingtree. Feel free to share on our Facebook Page!
This article was originally published in 2015 and has been updated for relevancy.