Top Tasks in UX: How to Identify What Really Matters to Your Users
All the way back in 2014, the web passed a pretty significant milestone: 1 billion websites. Of course, fewer than 200 million of these are actually active as of 2019, but there’s an important underlying point. People love to create. If the current digital age that we live in has taught us anything, it’s that it’s never been as easy to get information and ideas out into the world.
Understandably, this ability has been used – and often misused. Overloaded, convoluted websites are par for the course, with a common tactic for website renewal being to simply update them with a new coat of paint while ignoring the swirling pile of outdated and poorly organized content below.
So what are you supposed to do when trying to address this problem on your own website or digital project? Well, there’s a fairly robust technique called top tasks management. Here, we’ll go over exactly what it is and how you can use it.
Getting to grips with top tasks
Ideally, all websites would be given regular, comprehensive reviews. Old content could be revisited and analyzed to see whether it’s still actually serving a purpose. If not, it could be reworked or just removed entirely. Based on research, content creators could add new content to address user needs. Of course, this is just the ideal. The reality is that there’s never really enough time or resource to manage the growing mass of digital content in this way. The solution is to hone in on what your users actually use your website for and tailor the experience accordingly by looking at top tasks.
What are top tasks? They're basically a small set of tasks (typically around 5, but up to 10 is OK too) that are most important to your users. The thinking goes that if you get these core tasks right, your website will be serving the majority of your users and you’ll be more likely to retain them. Ignore top tasks (and any sort of task analysis), and you’ll likely find users leaving your website to find something else that better fits their needs.
The counter to top tasks is tiny tasks. These are everything on a website that’s not all that important for the people actually using it. Commonly, tiny tasks are driven more by the organization’s needs than those of the users. Typically, the more important a task is to a user, the less information there is to support it. On the other hand, the less important a task is to a user, the more information there is. Tiny tasks stem very much from ‘organization first’ thinking, wherein user needs are placed lower on the list of considerations.
According to Jerry McGovern (who penned an excellent write-up of top tasks on A List Apart), the top tasks model says “Focus on what really matters (the top tasks) and defocus on what matters less (the tiny tasks).”
How to identify top tasks
Figuring out your top tasks is an important step in clearing away the fog and identifying what actually matters to your users. We’ll call this stage of the process task discovery, and these are the steps:
Gather: Work with your organization to gather a list of all customer tasks
Refine: Take this list of tasks to a smaller group of stakeholders and work it down into a shortlist
User feedback: Go out to your users and get a representative sample to vote on them
Finalise: Assemble a table of tasks with the one with the highest number of votes at the top and the lowest number of votes at the bottom
We’ll go into detail on the above steps, explaining the best way of handling each one. Keep in mind that this process isn’t something you’ll be able to complete in a week – it’s more likely a 6 to 8-week project, depending on the size of your website, how large your user base is and the receptiveness of your organization to help out.
Step 1: Gather – Figure out the long list of tasks
The first part of the task process is to get out into the wider organization and discover what your users are actually trying to accomplish on your website or by using your products. It’s all about getting into the minds of your users – trying to see the world through their eyes, effectively.
If you’re struggling to think of places where you might find customer tasks, here are some of the best sources:
Analytics: Take a deep dive into the analytics of your website or product to find out how people are using them. For websites, you’ll want to look at pages with high traffic and common downloads or interactions. The same applies to products – although the data you have access to will depend on the analytics systems in place.
Customer support teams: Your own internal support teams can be a great source of user tasks. Support teams commonly spend all day speaking to users, and as a result, are able to build up a cohesive understanding of the types of tasks users commonly attempt.
Sales teams: Similarly, sales teams are another good source of task data. Sales teams typically deal with people before they become your users, but a part of their job is to understand the problems they’re trying to solve and how your website or product can help.
Direct customer feedback: Check for surveys your organization has run in the past to see whether any task data already exists.
Social media: Head to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to see what people are talking about with regards to your industry. What tasks are being mentioned?
It’s important to note that you need to cast a wide net when gathering task data. You can’t just rely on analytics data. Why? Well, downloads and page visits only reflect what you have, but not what your users might actually be searching for.
As for search, Jerry McGovern explains why it doesn’t actually tell the entire story: “When we worked on the BBC intranet, we found they had a feature called “Top Searches” on their homepage. The problem was that once they published the top searches list, these terms no longer needed to be searched for, so in time a new list of top searches emerged! Similarly, top tasks tend to get bookmarked, so they don’t show up as much in search. And the better the navigation, the more likely the site search is to reflect tiny tasks.”
At the end of the initial task-gathering stage you should be left with around 300 to 500 tasks. Of course, this can scale up or down depending on the size of the website or product.
Step 2: Refine – Create your shortlist
Now that you’ve got your long list of tasks, it’s time to trim them back until you’ve got a shortlist of 100 or less. Keep in mind that working through your long list of tasks is going to take some time, so plan for this process to take at least 4 weeks (but likely more).
It’s important to involve stakeholders from across the organization during the shortlist process. Bring in people from support, sales, product, marketing and leadership areas of the organization. In addition to helping you to create a more concise and usable list, the shortlist process helps your stakeholders to think about areas of overlap and where they may need to work together.
When working your list down to something more usable, try and consolidate and simplify. Stay away from product names as well as internal organization and industry jargon. With your tasks, you essentially want to focus on the underlying thing that a user is trying to do. If you were focusing on tasks for a bank, opt for “Transactions” instead of “Digital mobile payments”. Similarly, bring together tasks where possible. “Customer support”, “Help and support” and “Support center” can all be merged.
At a very technical level, it also helps to avoid lengthy tasks. Stick to around 7 to 8 words and try and avoid verbs, using them only when there’s really no other option. You’ll find that your task list becomes quite to navigate when tasks begin with “look”, “find” and “get”. Finally, stay away from specific audiences and demographics. You want to keep your tasks universal.
Step 3: User feedback – Get users to vote
With your shortlist created, it’s time to take it to your users. Using a survey tool like Optimal's Surveys, add in each one of your shortlisted tasks and have users rank 5 tasks on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most important and 1 being the least important.
If you’re thinking that your users will never take the time to work through such a long list, consider that the very length of the list means they’ll seek out the tasks that matter to them and ignore the ones that don’t.
A section of the customer survey in Questions.
Step 4: Finalize – Analyze your results
Now for the task analysis side of the project. What you want at the end of the user survey end of the project is a league table of entire shortlist of tasks. We’re going to use the example from Cisco’s top tasks project, which has been documented over at A List Apart by Gerry McGovern (who actually ran the project). The entire article is worth a read as it covers the process of running a top task project for a large organization.
Here’s what a league table of the top 20 tasks looks like from Cisco:
A league table of the top 20 tasks from Cisco’s top tasks project. Credit: Jerry McGovern.
Here’s the breakdown of the vote for Cisco’s tasks:
3 tasks got the first 25 percent of the vote
6 tasks got 25-50 percent of the vote
14 tasks got 50-75 percent of the vote
44 tasks got 75-100 percent of the vote
While the pattern may seem surprising, it’s actually not unusual. As Jerry explains: “We have done this process over 400 times and the same patterns emerge every single time.”
Final thoughts
Focusing on top tasks management is really a practice that needs to be conducted on a semi-regular basis. The approach benefits organizations in a multitude of ways, bringing different teams and people together to figure out how to best address why your users are coming to your website and what they actually need from you.
As we explained at the beginning of this article, top tasks is really about clearing away the fog and understanding on what really matters. Instead of spreading yourself thin and focusing on a host of tiny tasks, hone in on those top tasks that actually matter to your users.
Understanding how to improve your website
The top tasks approach is an effective way of giving you a clear idea of what you should be focusing on when designing or redesigning your website, but this should really just be one aspect of the work you do.
Utilizing a host of other UX research methods can give you a much more comprehensive idea of what’s working and what’s not. With card sorting, for example, you can learn how your users think the content on your website should be arranged. Then, with this data in hand, you can use tree testing to assemble draft structures of your website and test how people navigate their way through it. You can keep iterating on these structures to ensure you’ve created the most user-friendly navigation.
Take a look at our 101 guides to learn more about card sorting and tree testing, as well as the other user research methods you can use to make solid improvements to your website. If you’d rather just start putting methods into practice using user research tools, take our UX platform for a spin for free here.
Most product teams treat UX research as something that happens to them: a necessary evil that slows things down or a luxury they can't afford. The best product teams flip this narrative completely. Their research doesn't interrupt their roadmap; it powers it.
"We need insights by Friday."
"Proper research takes at least three weeks."
This conversation happens in product teams everywhere, creating an eternal tension between the need for speed and the demands of rigor. But what if this debate is based on a false choice?
Research that Moves at the Speed of Product
Product development has accelerated dramatically. Two-week sprints are standard. Daily deployment is common. Feature flags allow instant iterations. In this environment, a four-week research study feels like asking a Formula 1 race car to wait for a horse-drawn carriage.
The pressure is real. Product teams make dozens of decisions per sprint, about features, designs, priorities, and trade-offs. Waiting weeks for research on each decision simply isn't viable. So teams face an impossible choice: make decisions without insights or slow down dramatically.
As a result, most teams choose speed. They make educated guesses, rely on assumptions, and hope for the best. Then they wonder why features flop and users churn.
The False Dichotomy
The framing of "speed vs. rigor" assumes these are opposing forces. But the best research teams have learned they're not mutually exclusive, they require different approaches for different situations.
We think about research in three buckets, each serving a different strategic purpose:
Discovery: You're exploring a space, building foundational knowledge, understanding thelandscape before you commit to a direction. This is where you uncover the problems worth solving and identify opportunities that weren't obvious from inside your product bubble.
Fine-Tuning: You have a direction but need to nail the specifics. What exactly should this feature do? How should it work? What's the minimum viable version that still delivers value? This research turns broad opportunities into concrete solutions.
Delivery: You're close to shipping and need to iron out the final details: copy, flows, edge cases. This isn't about validating whether you should build it; it's about making sure you build it right.
Every week, our product, design, research and engineering leads review the roadmap together. We look at what's coming and decide which type of research goes where. The principle is simple: If something's already well-shaped, move fast. If it's risky and hard to reverse, invest in deeper research.
How Fast Can Good Research Be?
The answer is: surprisingly fast, when structured correctly!
For our teams, how deep we go isn't about how much time we have: it's about how much it would hurt to get it wrong. This is a strategic choice that most teams get backwards.
Go deep when the stakes are high, foundational decisions that affect your entire product architecture, things that would be expensive to reverse, moments where you need multiple stakeholders aligned around a shared understanding of the problem.
Move fast when you can afford to be wrong, incremental improvements to existing flows, things you can change easily based on user feedback, places where you want to ship-learn-adjust in tight loops.
Think of it as portfolio management for your research investment. Save your "big research bets" for the decisions that could set you back months, not days. Use lightweight validation for everything else.
And while good research can be fast, speed isn't always the answer. There are definitely situations where deep research needs to run and it takes time. Save those moments for high stakes investments like repositioning your entire product, entering new markets, or pivoting your business model. But be cautious of research perfectionism which is a risk with deep research. Perfection is the enemy of progress. Your research team shouldn’t be asking "Is this research perfect?" but instead "Is this insight sufficient for the decision at hand?"
The research goal should always be appropriate confidence, not perfect certainty.
The Real Trade-Off
The choice shouldn’t be speed vs. rigor, it's between:
Research that matters (timely, actionable, sufficient confidence)
Research that doesn't (perfect methodology, late arrival, irrelevant to decisions)
The best research teams have learned to be ruthlessly pragmatic. They match research effort to decision impact. They deliver "good enough" insights quickly for small decisions and comprehensive insights thoughtfully for big ones.
Speed and rigor aren't enemies. They're partners in a portfolio approach where each decision gets the right level of research investment. The teams winning aren't choosing between speed and rigor—they're choosing the appropriate blend for each situation.
How to Know When Your Current Tool Is Holding You Back
Your research platform should accelerate insights, not create obstacles. Yet many enterprise research teams are discovering their tools weren't built for the scale, velocity, and quality standards that today’s product development demands.
If you're experiencing any of these five warning signs, it might be time to evaluate alternatives.
1. Your Research Team Is Creating Internal Queues
The Challenge: When platforms limit concurrent studies, research becomes a first-come-first-served bottleneck and urgent research gets delayed by scheduled projects. In fast-moving businesses, research velocity directly impacts competitiveness. Every queued study is a delayed product launch, a missed market opportunity, or a competitor gaining ground.
The Solution: Enterprise-grade research platforms allow unlimited concurrent studies. Multiple teams can research simultaneously without coordination overhead or artificial constraints. Organizations that remove study volume constraints report 3-4x increases in research velocity within the first quarter of switching platforms.
2. Pricing Has Become Unpredictable
The Problem: When pricing gest too complicated, it becomes unpredictable. Some businesses have per-participant fees, usage caps and seat limits not to mention other hidden charges. Many pricing models weren't designed for enterprise-scale research, they were designed to maximize per-transaction revenue. When you can't predict research costs, you can't plan research roadmaps. Teams start rationing participants, avoiding "expensive" audiences, or excluding stakeholders from platform access to control costs.
The Solution: Transparent, scalable pricing with unlimited seats that grows with your needs. Volume-based plans that reward research investment rather than penalizing growth. No hidden per-participant markups.
3. Participant Quality Is Declining
The Problem: This is the most dangerous sign because it corrupts insights at the source. Low-quality participants create low-quality data, which creates poor product decisions.
Warning signs include:
Participants using AI assistance during moderated sessions
Bot-like response patterns in surveys
Participants who clearly don't meet screening criteria
Low-effort responses that provide no actionable insight
Increasing "throw away this response" rates in your analysis
Poor participant quality isn't just frustrating, it's expensive. Research with the wrong participants produces misleading insights that derail product strategy, waste development resources, and damage market positioning.
The Solution: Multi-layer fraud prevention systems. Behavioral verification. AI-response detection. Real-time quality monitoring. 100% quality guarantees backed by participant replacement policies. When product, design and research teams work with brands that offer 100% participant quality guarantees, they know that they can trust their research and make real business decisions from their insights.
4. You Can't Reach Your Actual Target Audience
The Problem: Limited panel reach forces compromises. Example: You need B2B software buyers but you get anyone who's used software. Research with "close enough" participants produces insights that don't apply to your actual market. Product decisions based on proxy audiences fail in real-world application.
The solution: Tools like Optimal that offer 10M+ participants across 150+ countries with genuine niche targeting capabilities. Proven Australian market coverage from broad demographics to specialized B2B audiences. Advanced screening beyond basic demographics.
5. Your Platform Hasn't Evolved with Your Needs
The Problem: You chose your platform 3-5 years ago when you were a smaller team with simpler needs. But your organization has grown, research has become more strategic, and your platform's limitations are now organizational constraints. Platform limitations become organizational limitations. When your tools can't support enterprise workflows, your research function can't deliver enterprise value.
The Solution: Complete research lifecycle support from recruitment to analysis. AI-powered insight generation. Enterprise-grade security and compliance. Dedicated support and onboarding. Integration ecosystems that connect research across your organization.
Why Enterprises Are Switching to Optimal
Leading product, design and research teams are moving to Optimal because it's specifically built to address the pain points outlined above:
No Study Volume Constraints: Run unlimited concurrent studies across your entire organization
Transparent, Scalable Pricing: Flexible plans with unlimited seats and predictable costs
Verified Quality Guarantee: 10M+ participants with multi-layer fraud prevention and 100% quality guarantee
Enterprise-Grade Platform: Complete research lifecycle tools, AI-powered insights, dedicated support
Next Steps
If you're experiencing any of these five signs, it's worth exploring alternatives. The cost of continuing with inadequate tools, delayed launches, poor data quality, limited research capacity, far outweigh the effort of evaluation.
There’s no doubt usability is a key element of all great user experiences, how do we apply and test usability principles for a website? This article looks at usability principles in web design, how to test it, practical tips for success and a look at our remote testing tool, Treejack.
A definition of usability for websites 🧐📖
Web usability is defined as the extent to which a website can be used to achieve a specific task or goal by a user. It refers to the quality of the user experience and can be broken down into five key usability principles:
Ease of use: How easy is the website to use? How easily are users able to complete their goals and tasks? How much effort is required from the user?
Learnability: How easily are users able to complete their goals and tasks the first time they use the website?
Efficiency: How quickly can users perform tasks while using your website?
User satisfaction: How satisfied are users with the experience the website provides? Is the experience a pleasant one?
Impact of errors: Are users making errors when using the website and if so, how serious are the consequences of those errors? Is the design forgiving enough make it easy for errors to be corrected?
Why is web usability important? 👀
Aside from the obvious desire to improve the experience for the people who use our websites, web usability is crucial to your website’s survival. If your website is difficult to use, people will simply go somewhere else. In the cases where users do not have the option to go somewhere else, for example government services, poor web usability can lead to serious issues. How do we know if our website is well-designed? We test it with users.
Testing usability: What are the common methods? 🖊️📖✏️📚
There are many ways to evaluate web usability and here are the common methods:
Moderated usability testing: Moderated usability testing refers to testing that is conducted in-person with a participant. You might do this in a specialised usability testing lab or perhaps in the user’s contextual environment such as their home or place of business. This method allows you to test just about anything from a low fidelity paper prototype all the way up to an interactive high fidelity prototype that closely resembles the end product.
Moderated remote usability testing: Moderated remote usability testing is very similar to the previous method but with one key difference- the facilitator and the participant/s are not in the same location. The session is still a moderated two-way conversation just over skype or via a webinar platform instead of in person. This method is particularly useful if you are short on time or unable to travel to where your users are located, e.g. overseas.
Unmoderated remote usability testing: As the name suggests, unmoderated remote usability testing is conducted without a facilitator present. This is usually done online and provides the flexibility for your participants to complete the activity at a time that suits them. There are several remote testing tools available ( including our suite of tools ) and once a study is launched these tools take care of themselves collating the results for you and surfacing key findings using powerful visual aids.
Guerilla testing: Guerilla testing is a powerful, quick and low cost way of obtaining user feedback on the usability of your website. Usually conducted in public spaces with large amounts of foot traffic, guerilla testing gets its name from its ‘in the wild’ nature. It is a scaled back usability testing method that usually only involves a few minutes for each test but allows you to reach large amounts of people and has very few costs associated with it.
Heuristic evaluation: A heuristic evaluation is conducted by usability experts to assess a website against recognized usability standards and rules of thumb (heuristics). This method evaluates usability without involving the user and works best when done in conjunction with other usability testing methods eg Moderated usability testing to ensure the voice of the user is heard during the design process.
Tree testing: Also known as a reverse card sort, tree testing is used to evaluate the findability of information on a website. This method allows you to work backwards through your information architecture and test that thinking against real world scenarios with users.
First click testing: Research has found that 87% of users who start out on the right path from the very first click will be able to successfully complete their task while less than half ( 46%) who start down the wrong path will succeed. First click testing is used to evaluate how well a website is supporting users and also provides insights into design elements that are being noticed and those that are being ignored.
Hallway testing: Hallway testing is a usability testing method used to gain insights from anyone nearby who is unfamiliar with your project. These might be your friends, family or the people who work in another department down the hall from you. Similar to guerilla testing but less ‘wild’. This method works best at picking up issues early in the design process before moving on to testing a more refined product with your intended audience.
Online usability testing tool: Tree testing 🌲🌳🌿
Tree testing is a remote usability testing tool that uses tree testing to help you discover exactly where your users are getting lost in the structure of your website. Treejack uses a simplified text-based version of your website structure removing distractions such as navigation and visual design allowing you to test the design from its most basic level.
Like any other tree test, it uses task based scenarios and includes the opportunity to ask participants pre and post study questions that can be used to gain further insights. Tree testing is a useful tool for testing those five key usability principles mentioned earlier with powerful inbuilt features that do most of the heavy lifting for you. Tree testing records and presents the following for each task:
complete details of the pathways followed by each participant
the time taken to complete each task
first click data
the directness of each result
visibility on when and where participants skipped a task
Participant paths data in our tree testing tool 🛣️
The level of detail recorded on the pathways followed by your participants makes it easy for you to determine the ease of use, learnability, efficiency and impact of errors of your website. The time taken to complete each task and the directness of each result also provide insights in relation to those four principles and user satisfaction can be measured through the results to your pre and post survey questions.
The first click data brings in the added benefits of first click testing and knowing when and where your participants gave up and moved on can help you identify any issues.Another thing tree testing does well is the way it brings all data for each task together into one comprehensive overview that tells you everything you need to know at a glance. Tree testing's task overview- all the key information in one placeIn addition to this, tree testing also generates comprehensive pathway maps called pietrees.
Each junction in the pathway is a piechart showing a statistical breakdown of participant activity at that point in the site structure including details about: how many were on the right track, how many were following the incorrect path and how many turned around and went back. These beautiful diagrams tell the story of your usability testing and are useful for communicating the results to your stakeholders.
Test early and often: Usability testing isn’t something that only happens at the end of the project. Start your testing as soon as possible and iterate your design based on findings. There are so many different ways to test an idea with users and you have the flexibility to scale it back to suit your needs.
Try testing with paper prototypes: Just like there are many usability testing methods, there are also several ways to present your designs to your participant during testing. Fully functioning high fidelity prototypes are amazing but they’re not always feasible (especially if you followed the previous tip of test early and often). Paper prototypes work well for usability testing because your participant can draw on them and their own ideas- they’re also more likely to feel comfortable providing feedback on work that is less resolved! You could also use paper prototypes to form the basis for collaborative design sessions with your users by showing them your idea and asking them to redesign or design the next page/screen.
Run a benchmarking round of testing: Test the current state of the design to understand how your users feel about it. This is especially useful if you are planning to redesign an existing product or service and will save you time in the problem identification stages.
Bring stakeholders and clients into the testing process: Hearing how a product or service is performing direct from a user can be quite a powerful experience for a stakeholder or client. If you are running your usability testing in a lab with an observation room, invite them to attend as observers and also include them in your post session debriefs. They’ll gain feedback straight from the source and you’ll gain an extra pair of eyes and ears in the observation room. If you’re not using a lab or doing a different type of testing, try to find ways to include them as observers in some way. Also, don’t forget to remind them that as observers they will need to stay silent for the entire session beyond introducing themselves so as not to influence the participant - unless you’ve allocated time for questions.
Make the most of available resources: Given all the usability testing options out there, there’s really no excuse for not testing a design with users. Whether it’s time, money, human resources or all of the above making it difficult for you, there’s always something you can do. Think creatively about ways to engage users in the process and consider combining elements of different methods or scaling down to something like hallway testing or guerilla testing. It is far better to have a less than perfect testing method than to not test at all.
Never analyse your findings alone: Always analyse your usability testing results as a team or with at least one other person. Making sense of the results can be quite a big task and it is easy to miss or forget key insights. Bring the team together and affinity diagram your observations and notes after each usability testing session to ensure everything is captured. You could also use Reframer to record your observations live during each session because it does most of the analysis work for you by surfacing common themes and patterns as they emerge. Your whole team can use it too saving you time.
Engage your stakeholders by presenting your findings in creative ways: No one reads thirty page reports anymore. Help your stakeholders and clients feel engaged and included in the process by delivering the usability testing results in an easily digestible format that has a lasting impact. You might create an A4 size one page summary, or maybe an A0 size wall poster to tell everyone in the office the story of your usability testing or you could create a short video with snippets taken from your usability testing sessions (with participant permission of course) to communicate your findings. Remember you’re also providing an experience for your clients and stakeholders so make sure your results are as usable as what you just tested.
