Top Tasks: A simple way to find out what matters most to your customers

The key to success in any web project is understanding your customers and what is most important to them. To best serve the people visiting your website, we need to find out what tasks they are trying to accomplish, or what information they are looking for. 

The Top Tasks methodology, developed by Gerry McGovern, offers a practical way to figure out what matters most to your users and prioritise your content in response. This approach has been adopted by organisations all around the world to design clearer, more effective digital experiences. 

In this blog I am going cover:  

• What is the Top Tasks methodology? 

• What is involved in running Top Tasks research? 

• How will it benefit you? 

• Commonly asked questions 

I’ve been using Top Tasks methodology for the past 3 years after learning about it in a previous role. In that time, I’ve used it for dozens of different web projects, across small and large enterprise, private sector, public sector, and non-profit organisations. One thing I have noticed over that time, is that regardless of company size or sector, this type of research has a consistent pattern across the results of every survey. That pattern is something I will dig into a little later in the blog.  

What is the Top Tasks methodology? 

Top Tasks methodology allows us to engage with your end users to identify what really matters to them (the top tasks) and deprioritise the information that doesn’t (the tiny tasks). In many organisations, a lot of energy is put into polishing pages that few people ever visit, while the ones people really need get left behind. It is hard to know where to put that focus without having the research and insights to back it up. Using Top Tasks methodology can answer the question: What is it that your customers really want? 

What is involved running Top Tasks research? 

Setting up and running Top Tasks research for your web project is a collaborative process. The first step is to identify a long list of tasks, which is an exhaustive list of all potential tasks that your users might want to complete. To gather this initial list, we will look to the following types of sources: 

• Search data 

• Website analytics 

• Surveys and customer research 

• Call centre data 

• Internal and external stakeholders 

• Competitor analysis 

That initial long list of tasks then needs to be edited and refined so that each task is unique and relevant. Your customers are then asked via a quick digital survey what the five most important things to them from that list are. Once the survey has been completed by enough research participants, we can start to extract and analyse the data. 

Understand the results 

The results of this user research will tell us what is most important to your customers when interacting with your website. This step in the process is what Gerry McGovern calls the vote trend analysis. The most important tasks, the Top Tasks, are those that make up the top 50 percent of the vote. Earlier I mentioned a common pattern across research results, and that pattern is this; when there are 100 tasks in the final task-list: 

• The top five tasks get the first 25% of the vote (the most important top tasks)  

• 10 tasks get the next 25% of the vote (also top tasks) 

• 35 tasks get the next 25% (less important tasks) 

• 50 tasks get the final 25% (tiny tasks) 

So, the top 5 tasks get as much of the vote as the bottom 50*. This sort of data will allow you to focus on developing and elevating the content your users need most. 

*From Gerry McGovern’s Top Tasks – A how-to guide 

How will it benefit your organisation? 

Having your web or content team armed with the knowledge gained by Top Tasks research can help with conversations about what information to elevate on your homepage or what pages could be removed from your website. It can show that, although certain regulatory information is required to be published on your site, it’s actually ok to nest that information a bit deeper, as long as it is still discoverable for those few people who need it. It allows you and your team to focus your time and effort on your users' top tasks and forget about the tiny tasks. 

Commonly asked questions about Top Tasks: 

Q: How many tasks should be included in the survey? 

A: Your shortlist of tasks can be anywhere between 30 to 100, depending on how many tasks customers can realistically complete on your website. According to Gerry McGovern’s book, 50-80 is the typical length of a final task-list. 

Q: But isn’t a list of 100 tasks completely overwhelming for people taking the survey? 

A: Yes, but that is the whole point. When users are confronted with a long list of tasks, they are forced to pick what matters most to them based on gut feeling. “The sheer size of the list forces the gut instinct of the customer to kick in.” 

Q: How many customers need to complete the survey to get quality results? 

A: 400 people, according to Gerry McGovern, however he goes on to say that you can also get good results with about 200 people, and even 100 people will give you a strong indication of what the top three tasks are.  

“For the European Commission survey, which included 107,000 participants, the top three tasks had emerged after surveying just 30 participants...after 30 participants the top three tasks were exactly the same as after 107,000.”  

Q: How will new customers know what is most important to them if they’ve never interacted with us before? 

A: Even if someone has never interacted with you before, they have something in mind that they need when visiting your website. It pays to add a segmentation question to understand more about the survey respondents. 

Q: Should the list of tasks take into consideration what our organisation’s goals are as well as what our customers are trying to do? 

A: The short answer is yes. But when creating your initial list, 80% of the tasks should be from customer sources (analytics, research, call-centre data) and just 20% should be from the organisation lens (e.g. internal stakeholders).