Continuing Measuring Customer Effort with Top Tasks
Measuring Customer Effort with Top Tasks
Gerry McGovern at UX Brighton 2017
Methods mentioned
Related reading
Books, research, ideas and people referenced in this talk.
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Books
- Top Tasks: A How-to Guide33:55McGovern's practical guide to identifying, prioritising and continuously measuring customers' top tasks.
Papers and articles
- What Really Matters: Focusing on Top Tasks02:36An explanation of the voting method and the Cisco finding that a few tasks attract most demand.
- Task Performance Indicator: A Management Metric for Customer Experience27:54The full method for measuring task success against a target completion time.
- How Many Participants for Quantitative Usability Studies?26:38Modern statistical guidance that adds context to the talk's small-sample quantitative claim.
- Remote moderated usability testing29:04Practical guidance for the remote, screen-shared observation method recommended in the talk.
Concepts
- Top Tasks identification00:34A survey method for identifying high-demand top tasks and low-demand tiny tasks.
- The Long Neck and tiny tasks03:18A recurring distribution in which a small cluster of tasks dominates a long tail of low-demand activity.
- Usability effectiveness and efficiency23:19ISO 9241-11 frames usability around whether users succeed and the effort they expend.
- Task-based UX metrics28:10An introduction to completion rate and time on task, the two behavioural measures used here.
- Outcome-based service performance33:14Service guidance centred on user outcomes rather than organisational production.
Projects and resources
- European Union Top Tasks research06:00The large multilingual study used to show that customer priorities remain consistent across countries.
- Norwegian Cancer Society website redesign09:13A redesign that prioritised cancer information over donation-led content while donations increased.
- Passport service locations in Canada23:28The service illustrates how a simple location input can outperform a complex map.


