Top Tasks for UX Design: How and why to Create Them

Top Tasks for UX Design: How and Why to Create Them

Every website redesign starts with a meeting where each department argues for homepage space. Marketing wants the campaign, sales wants the product grid, leadership wants the vision statement. Everyone has a case. Nobody has data about what users actually came to do. Top tasks analysis is how you get that data — and it ends the argument permanently.

Top Tasks are a list of 10 or fewer things that users must be able to do with your design to be successful. If people can’t do them, the design will fail – no matter how beautiful it looks.

What is top tasks analysis?

It’s a prioritization survey with one deliberate constraint: users must choose. You compile a complete list of tasks your product supports — “check my balance,” “find a branch,” “track an order,” “read about the company’s sustainability program” — and present the whole randomized list to users, asking them to vote for only their top five.

The forced choice is the entire point. Ask users to rate importance and everything is “very important.” Force them to pick five out of eighty and the truth comes out.

The results, across hundreds of such studies McGovern and others have run, follow a consistent pattern: a long tail of tiny tasks and a short head of dominant ones. The top few tasks typically capture about a quarter of all votes. Meanwhile, a majority of the listed tasks share crumbs — including, almost always, the tasks internal teams fight hardest for.

Why does this matter so much for design?

Because navigation, homepages, and feature priorities are usually built from the organization’s perspective, not the user’s. The consequences are measurable: users can’t find the one thing they came for because it’s competing with forty things they didn’t.

Top tasks gives you three assets:

1. Navigation that matches demand. Your top tasks become your primary navigation labels — written in the users’ voted words, not department names.

2. A defensible homepage. “These five tasks earned 25% of user votes” settles the homepage politics meeting with evidence instead of seniority.

3. A standing success metric. The method’s real power is ongoing: measure task success rate and completion time for your top tasks quarterly. “Our top task completion went from 61% to 89%” is the clearest UX ROI statement that exists.

Why Top Tasks Work

• They focus the team on what’s truly important.

• Other tasks and features can exist, but they should never negatively affect the Top Tasks.

• They help maintain balance in research and serve as a guide for heuristic evaluation.

How to Create a Top Task List (Step by Step)

1. Talk to internal stakeholders – interview or survey them to understand business goals and assumptions.
   
   

2. Combine user research methods:

   • Field studies

   • User interviews

   • Analytics analysis

   • A survey with both open and closed‑ended questions
     
     

3. Form a hypothesis list – often around 100 potential tasks.
   
   

4. Survey users (and possible users) – ask them to pick their top 10 from that list.
   
   

5. The most selected tasks become your Top Tasks list.

How do you run one?

Step 1: Gather the task list.

Collect candidate tasks from support tickets, search logs, analytics, stakeholder interviews, and your sitemap. Expect 60–100 raw items.

Step 2: Edit ruthlessly into user language.

Merge duplicates, kill overlaps, remove internal jargon, and phrase every task as something a user would say: “renew my subscription,” not “subscription management services.” This editing step is where most of the value hides — a badly worded task list poisons the results.

Step 3: Survey.

Present the full randomized list, ask for exactly five choices, and collect 400+ responses from representative users. Below that sample, the tail gets noisy.

Step 4: Act on it.

Rebuild navigation around the top tasks, demote the tail, and set baseline task-completion metrics. Then re-measure after every significant change.

Put Top Tasks to Work

• Share the list with your entire team.

• Post it in team spaces, near desks, and in any key place where work happens.

• Use it as a constant reminder of user vision.

What mistakes ruin the method?

• Letting stakeholders add promotional items as “tasks.” “Discover our exciting new partnership” is not a task; it’s a wish. The list must contain only things a user would genuinely come to do.

• Segmenting too early. Run the full population first. Segments (new vs returning, consumer vs business) matter, but split the analysis after, not the survey.

• Doing it once. User priorities shift. Re-run annually, and the deltas themselves become insight.

Top tasks is one of the highest-value research methods relative to its cost

we’ve seen it reshape whole information architectures in a single cycle. If you want it run properly on your product, from task-list editing to the success metrics, that’s our UX strategy consulting.