What It Is
The purpose of the Top Tasks activity is to simplify website content by identifying what really matters to people using your site. Top tasks are the small set of activities (usually less than 10, often less than five) that matter most to your customers.
Why It's Important
Services designed around users and their needs:
- Improve customer engagement: When digital services are easy to use by all, reliable and predictable—and meet Coloradan’s needs, engagement in state services improves.
- Reduce costs: By improved self-service, reducing in-person touchpoints, reducing call center volume, reduce duplication of work across divisions and agencies.
How to Do It
- Engage the project team in a process of gathering tasks that can be accomplished on the website you're focusing on.
- Work with key stakeholders to come up with a shortlist of these tasks.
- Get a representative sample of customers to vote via a survey distributed (e.g. via GovDelivery email list).
- Compile and rank results by creating a league table of tasks from the one with the highest vote to the one with the lowest vote.
Learn More
Top Tasks for UX Design: How and Why to Create Them (Video), Nielsen Norman Group
What Really Matters: Focusing on Top Tasks, A List Apart
How to Improve Your UX Designs with Top Tasks, Interaction Design Foundation