Top Tasks

What Are Top Tasks?

Top tasks is a methodology designed to help you work in a structured and targeted way to create better user experiences. It focuses on gaining insights into your users' most important needs and aligning these with target audiences and other data. With top tasks, resources are used efficiently because it becomes easier to prioritize what delivers the most value to the greatest number of users. Measurement is key in the top tasks approach, ensuring that decisions are data-driven and that user satisfaction is successfully achieved.

User Tasks and Top Tasks

People visit websites to accomplish something or find answers to their questions—these are their user tasks. A top task is one of the tasks that most users come to your site to complete. These tasks should be prioritized in both design and resource allocation to ensure they are easy to accomplish, leading to effective self-service and high user satisfaction.

What Makes Top Tasks Unique

This methodology is unique because it focuses on why people visit your site, rather than just looking at page visit statistics. It can reveal why pages are being visited, whether users are searching for content you don’t have, or if they’re looking in the wrong place. Additionally, measuring top tasks provides insights into your target audiences, whether they can complete their tasks, and what might be causing them problems.

A Management Tool

Top tasks make it easier to think holistically about user needs across your website, customer service center, and app. Collaboration becomes simpler because it’s easier to discuss user tasks and how easy they are to complete, rather than relying on web statistics alone. Instead of debating based on guesses or unclear data, top tasks provide a shared understanding and clear metrics to guide decisions.

It Makes It Easier To:

• Collaborate to achieve goals with a shared understanding and clear metrics
• Measure how easy your website or service is to use
• Prioritize effective actions and gain confidence in your decisions
• Reduce the risk of wasting time and resources on the wrong things
• Report on user experience in a way that fosters understanding and clarity across the organization

Measuring Top Tasks

Measuring top tasks provides clear metrics for decision-making and key performance indicators (KPIs) for user experience. Two important KPIs are demand and completion rate.

Demand

Demand measures the importance of tasks—what matters most to your users? It shows the percentage of users coming to complete each task. A common pattern is that most visitors to a website have the same top tasks. Often, 50% of users come to accomplish the same 5-6 tasks. These tasks should be prioritized and made easy to complete. It's also crucial to know what people are not visiting your site for (micro-tasks) so you can avoid wasting time on the wrong things.

Completion Rate

Completion rate (or success rate) measures user experience. It shows the percentage of users who were able to complete the task they came for and indicates if the website is effective. This is a popular way to measure the impact of changes. How many more users are able to accomplish their goals on the new website? The completion rate should be above 80%. What’s yours?

Calculate the Cost of Frustration

How much does a poor user experience cost? The consequence of a low completion rate can be increased costs and lost revenue. This happens because users who cannot complete their tasks on the website may take alternative actions. They might contact customer support, which increases costs, or switch to a competitor, resulting in lost revenue. With Skyra, you can measure how many users are unable to complete their tasks and calculate the cost of frustration. This is a smart way to build a business case for UX and websites. Contact us to see examples.

Website + Customer Support

Top tasks can also be applied beyond websites, such as in customer support centers. If one of your website’s goals is to reduce the number of calls to customer support, it’s smart to measure top tasks in both areas. If the website team knows why users contact customer support, it becomes easier to create better self-service options on the site. Additionally, you can measure if fewer people are calling as the website’s completion rate improves.

How to Measure Top Tasks

With Skyra, a mini-survey is placed on your website to allow visitors to report their user tasks. The responses are reported in Skyra’s dashboard, offering multiple analysis options.

The Process

Measuring top tasks occurs in two steps. First, user tasks and target groups are identified. Then, the top tasks are measured, and feedback and data are collected and linked to each top task to provide insights.

Step 1: Discovery Survey

This survey gathers knowledge about what users want in their own words. It’s recommended to collect at least 500 responses and let the survey run for at least four weeks. The goal is to compile a list of user tasks.

Analysis: The responses are sorted to find patterns and clarify the user tasks.

Step 2: Top Task Survey

Once you know the user tasks, they are included in the next survey. Users select the task they came to complete and whether they were able to complete it. You can also ask about target groups or other relevant information.

Reporting: The tasks are sorted by how many users want to accomplish them—combined with how many actually succeed in doing so.

Four Fundamental Questions

Top task analysis is based on four fundamental questions to determine if you have a "good" website or what needs improvement.

1. Who is visiting the website?
2. Why are they visiting the website?
3. Did they accomplish what they came to do?
4. What is causing problems?

It’s also common to add a few more questions, depending on what you want to measure. With Skyra, for example, you can add a question inviting users to participate in a user test.

Features in Skyra

Top Tasks, Completion Rate, and Target Groups** are highlighted with a customized dashboard.

The dashboard presents the big picture with clear metrics, while also providing insights into specific user tasks.

Analyze specific target groups, time periods, devices, and more.

Export data to CSV. Integration with PowerBI is coming soon.

Responses and data are collected through a mini-survey on the website, where users report their tasks and answer a few questions.

The survey can be minimized and follow users around the site, including logged-in pages, to gather feedback at the end of their visit.

Settings control how many users see the survey and ensure it doesn’t reappear for the same person.

Certain types of personal information submission are blocked.

Custom IDs can be used for A/B testing, measuring which version has the highest completion rate.

And much more...

Learn More About Top Tasks

Gerry McGovern developed the top tasks methodology. The traditional approach is project-based and can involve up to 200 hours for mapping and reporting top tasks. Skyra automates much of this work, and reporting is done continuously rather than on a project basis.

To learn more, there are many articles available online. Additionally, Gerry has extensive teaching on YouTube.

Are Halland 's core model is closely related to top tasks. He is a sought-after instructor who regularly teaches on this topic.