UX Research: How to find out what your users really care about
I often think that life is all about priorities. All the abundance and choices we have available to us, what we spend our time and energy on: one way or another, will be prioritised, whether intentional or not. So in the world of User Experience design, how do we prioritise?
How do we decide what to put on the homepage, landing page, article page or similar on our website or app we are working on, and in what order?
In my experience, unless you interfere, more content, more features and more adverts (sometimes disguised as helpful content) will get added onto the page by request from all the stakeholders involved. We assume that the more information we give to users, the more helpful our website or application will be.
Measuring Customer Experience
To find out what your users main tasks are and make sure they can achieve those tasks on your website, I have been using a UX Research method championed by Gerry McGovern called Top task analysis. Essentially, Top tasks is about finding out what are the most important things that your users want to achieve on your website.
I love it because it gives you a way to quantify User experience and practice evidence based design over opinion based, “big ego” design. It also allows you to become truly familiar with your product and client you are working with.
The benefits of top tasks
- Allows you to prioritise what people care about.
- Improve people’s experience on your website, solution, app.
- Gives you clear metrics on the customer experience of your website.
- Allows you to design with evidence over opinion.
How it works
- List all tasks
Gather all of the possible tasks your users might have and make a list. This is a comprehensive process, forcing you to review all of the tasks related to the product you are working with. This list should include about 200–500 tasks and include sources such as top 50 Google searches, top internal site searches, most visited pages on your website, social media posts, previous surveys, competitor website, any customer support department feedback etc. - Shortlist
Once you have the long list (we used a spreadsheet), gather you team: including stakeholders, product owners, developers, content writers, marketing and customer support. Together, go through the list and decide which tasks to keep and which to delete. You want to get the list down to about 50 final tasks without any duplication. We did this in 4 two hour sessions. The wording of the tasks is very important: tasks should not be too long (no more than 65 characters), should be clear and concise, not use brands, overlaps, confusing concepts or verbs — you want people to easily understand what the task means. - Survey
Once you have your final list, you use it to create a survey. Make sure the list is randomised and ask 200–400 people to pick their top 5 tasks. You could put the survey on your website as a pop up or recruit participants who represent your website audience. It’s also interesting to get the internal team to vote on what they think people will pick as their top 5! - Analyse
When you get the results, you will likely have 6–10% of all votes go to the top tasks. This might sound low at first but when you look more closely, you’ll notice that the top 10 tasks received about 50% of the votes. This is what happened for us and what Gerry McGovern has experienced when he used this method with the likes of CISCO, Irish Health and the European Union.
5. Iterate
Now you know what your users top tasks are, create tests on your website to see how easily those tasks can be achieved. Measure how successfully users can complete tasks and how long it takes them (Gerry recommend an unmoderated, remote study). Then, iterate on your website to improve the top task success rates.
You can choose to focus just on one or two of the top tasks or try to cater across them all. My recommendation is to focus on absolutely nailing the top one first.
Top tasks is a great way to focus the entire team on what really matters to your users and gives you a metric to measure customer experience. To read about the Top tasks method in more details check out the following links:
