ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Every website and app I’ve worked on has eventually developed the same problem. It accumulates content, features, navigation options, and stakeholder requests until everything is apparently important.
Of course, when everything is important, nothing is. You end up with a homepage trying to please 14 departments, navigation labels negotiated by committee, and an interface that gives the refund policy the same prominence as whatever users came to do in the first place. Which is a slightly peculiar way to design something for humans.
This is why I’ve relied on top task analysis for years.
Top task analysis identifies the tasks, questions, and features your audience values most. Rather than asking people whether they like a particular idea, it forces them to prioritize what matters.
That distinction is useful because people can want many things in theory. But when they have to choose, a much smaller set usually rises to the top.
Those top tasks give you an evidence-based foundation for decisions such as:
- What should appear prominently on a landing page
- Which features deserve attention in an app
- How a website’s information architecture should be organized
- What information belongs in a dashboard
- Which stakeholder requests can safely sit further down the list
It won’t make the political conversations completely disappear, sadly. But “our users ranked this above that” is a considerably stronger position than “I feel this button should be bigger.”
- A traditional survey can collect what people say they want, but the result is often another long list. You’ve discovered 47 things your audience cares about and somehow made the original problem worse. Well done, everyone.
Top task analysis adds prioritization. Participants choose the 5 tasks that matter most to them and then rank those choices. That gives you a clearer picture of relative importance rather than a pile of individually reasonable requests.
The approach can work for all sorts of digital products.
- On an ecommerce site, tasks might include checking delivery charges, tracking an order, or arranging a return.
- On a marketing site, they might be understanding pricing, comparing options, or finding evidence that a product works.
- In an application, they might be the handful of features people use every day.
Once you know what sits at the top, you can design around those priorities and fit the smaller tasks around them.
- Although top task analysis is valuable, running one has traditionally involved a slightly awkward collection of survey tools, spreadsheets, and manual cleanup. I’ve spent enough of my life staring at those spreadsheets, so I built a dedicated Top Task Analysis app instead.
It is 100% free, and I intend to keep it that way.
You can create a survey, add a few sample tasks, and share it with your audience. Participants select their 5 most important tasks, add missing options for others to choose, and then prioritize their selections.
The admin area shows which tasks matter most, and you can compare the priorities of different audience groups. You can also rename, merge, or remove responses as you clean up the results, rather than performing spreadsheet surgery and hoping you haven’t accidentally deleted Western Europe.
If you’d like to understand the process before creating a survey, I’ve also written a step-by-step guide to running a top task analysis. It covers gathering tasks, recruiting participants, analyzing the results, and using what you learn.
The app will collect and organize the evidence, but it won’t decide what your interface should become. You still need to interpret the results, balance competing needs, and make sensible design choices.
That is a good thing. We already have enough tools claiming to replace judgment while producing dashboards nobody reads.
But top task analysis gives that judgment somewhere solid to start. It replaces a surprising amount of guesswork with direct evidence about what your audience came to do, and it makes prioritization conversations much easier to have.
Try the free Top Task Analysis app
I’m also launching the app on Product Hunt today, complete with a short video showing how it works. If you have a moment, please take a look at the launch and let me know what you think there.
I’d genuinely value your first impressions, so if you have a moment, please leave a comment on Product Hunt. In particular, I’d love to know:
- Whether you can see a situation where you’d use it
- How you’d like to use it
- Whether there are any features you think are missing
And once you’ve had a chance to try it properly, ongoing feedback is equally welcome. If you run a survey and discover something confusing, missing, or mildly irritating, please let me know. I built this to make a useful research approach easier to adopt, so real-world grumbling is far more useful than polite applause.
