Embedded Files
Strategic decision making demands accurate data. Focus groups and surveys are user-reported metrics. Participants share what they think they do and what they want. We need to base our changes on what users do, not what they say.
A small number of features delivers huge value. The few, essential tasks are the top tasks. Among those top tasks, there may also be hundreds or thousands of tiny tasks.
These tiny tasks are potentially useful when managed properly but can destroy value by getting in the way of the top tasks.
Over time, as more and more people contribute content, intranets and websites become a digital graveyard full of replication and obsolete information.
Manage the top tasks so users can complete them quickly and easily. There are generally around 5 top tasks that matter most to users.
When customers identify what is most important to them in a particular task environment with 100 tasks, 15 tasks (top and medium) will get the first 50% of the vote.
The top 5 tasks will get as much of the vote as the bottom 50.
If you truly want to understand customer effort and experience, you must measure the performance of their top and medium tasks.
The purpose is to reduce complexity by identifying what really matters to customers. The following steps are involved in a task identification process:
Gather Long list of potential tasks
Get to a short list of tasks
Get customers to vote
Analyze the results
STEP 1: Gather long list of potential tasks
Use the process of gathering the long list of potential tasks to get outside of organization thinking and inside the users’ mind and world. Actively engage the key stakeholders in this process.
Use common data sources to help gather the list of tasks.
Do not use numbers for your most visited pages and top search terms. These can be unreliable metrics.
Page visits reflect what you have, not necessarily what customers want.
Analyses of page views often reflect an mixture of tasks; it’s hard to separate the top tasks on these pages from the tiny tasks.
There may be tasks that you don’t have content for—so it’s unlikely they will show up in search and site data.
Search doesn’t tell the whole story.
Top tasks tend to get bookmarked, so they don’t show up as much in search.
The better the navigation, the more likely the site search is to reflect tiny tasks.
STEP 2: Get to a short list of tasks
Bring the long list of tasks down to a shortlist of no more than 100, using these guidelines. Getting a feel for the tasks takes time. Plan on four to six weeks to do the task research and get to the shortlist.
The most important part of the shortlisting process is involving as many key stakeholders as possible. Bring together marketing, support, communications, product, and other teams and they will begin to understand where there was overlap, and how they would need to collaborate on content and navigation.
There will usually be too many tasks for users to consider individually. Users will scan the tasks and look for key words that are top-of-mind. This is why it is essential to have the list randomized, so tasks have an equal chance of being near the top or bottom of the list.
STEP 3: Get customers to vote
Present the enumerated list of tasks in randomized order to representative users. Ask each person pick out only five on the list.
The voting survey needs to be designed this way because we want to find out what really matters to people—what they do versus what they say they do. The very length and overload of the survey forces the gut instinct to kick in. You don’t “read” the list; rather, the tasks that really matter to you jump out.
The core deliverable of the survey is a league table of tasks. You get to know not just the top tasks, but also the tiny tasks, and how each task ranks in relation to other tasks. It gives you a hierarchy of importance that will allow you to make design and content decisions—what to prioritize, what not to prioritize.
STEP 4: Analyze the results
Count up the votes each task received. Sort them in descending order. The characteristic shape of the top-task graph is the “long neck” of the vital few tasks you users care about. Notice the handful of tasks which really stand out near the left side of each graph? These are the top tasks.
You’ll also see the long tail of the trivial tasks that are less important. Of course, you can’t just stop supporting your less important tasks, but you should be sure those top tasks can be completed effectively and efficiently.
The essence of a great user experience is to help people quickly and easily complete their tasks—but to do that, you need evidence of those tasks, not opinions. The benefits of such an evidence-based, collaborative approach are worth the effort.
Another key outcome of Top Tasks Management is a more collaborative work environment, where people come together to manage a task, rather than just manage a website or an app or publish content for a particular department.
Top Tasks Management gives you the data to focus on what really matters: removing (or at least de-emphasizing) a large amount of tiny tasks, and improving the small set of top tasks that your customers really want.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse