#top tasks

Over and over again, I keep coming back to "Top Tasks." It was the last presentation at last year's An Event Apart and it continues to be the thing I want to share with everyone.

The idea is incredibly simple: focus your web efforts on the top tasks your users need to accomplish when they get to your site.

This seems like a no brainer, and yet few sites do this. Most sites focus on what they want to tell the user or what they want the user to do. A lot of effort is put into those tell-and-want items: hours and hours. Most of these changes feel small and are often afterthoughts. "Hey, this should be on the web somewhere." This happens over and over again until the hey-this-should-be-on-the-web-somewhere things dominate your whole web site and navigation, leaving the user to wade through the clutter to find what they really need (if they even decide to wade through the clutter at all.).

Gerry McGovern (who gave the Top Tasks talk at an Event Apart) wrote a great article about this at A List Apart. He's also giving a short (30 minutes!) webinar on it this Thursday at 8am, PDT. I sent out an email inviting the people who I thought would enjoy it most, but also feel like everyone should know about it because this could really transform our web sites and apps.

Sign up

Customer Experience Excellence and Top Tasks (it's free) Thursday, May 25 at 8am → Register here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5863909198954395394

Transform

And because Top Tasks keeps coming up for me (somehow I think about it all the time), I've decided to put Gerry's book Transform at the top of my reading queue. It was going to be John Maeda's The Laws of Simplicity, and it will be soon. But first, it will be Transform, which I assume is all about Top Tasks and which Gerry calls "A Rebel's Guide to Digital Transformation." I'll report out.

Links

Sign up for the webinar (only 30 minutes and it’s free)

About Gerry McGovern

What Really Matters: Focusing on Top Tasks (article, A List Apart)

Transform (book, Amazon)

The Laws of Simplicity (book, Amazon)

This month I'll be reading (and sharing excerpts from) John Maeda's book The Laws of Simplicity.

I ordered it and plan to do a chapter (or section, depending on size) each work day. Until it comes, I'm perusing his LoS web page, which starts with thoughts about simplicity (Law 1: Reduce) and the basic question: how simple can you make it?

We see the creeping of complexity all the time in the website and app world. Or we did. A few years ago we started to see a drastic simplicity come about (think of the complexity of Flickr vs. the simplicity of Instagram). Turns out, we'd begun to put too many options (aka All the Options!) in everything. Our sites and apps became too bloated. Things became too cluttered with competing hierarchies. Here on campus you can see that in the campus website, most departments' web navigations, our options on the mobile app, and the quick links in the portal. It's not bad that we have all these choices and options – they exist. People need them. But what we don't need is to front load them on to the user.

Gerry McGovern (web industry thought leader based in Ireland) talked about Top Tasks in the last An Event Apart I attended. Specifically, he spoke of prioritizing the most common tasks your user wants to accomplish when hitting your site or app. He surmises putting your energy into those top tasks and making them the easiest things to find and to accomplish. I think about this constantly. This would transform our websites in the most radical and helpful way. Plus, it would be a really fun (ongoing) project.

The easiest way to start

Make "how can I simplify this?" your mantra, then

Identify your user (or even just one type of user)

Identify their top tasks (obvious start: site analytics; also helpful: informal user interviews)

Challenge yourself: make those top-tasks your site and app priority

Links

About John Maeda (Wikipedia)

Maeda Studio

The Laws of Simplicity Web Site

Gerry McGovern (Twitter)