Measuring Customer Effort with Top Tasks
Gerry McGovern at UX Brighton 2017
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.


