Strategies for Determining Your Top Tasks

People have tasks, and they’re almost always in a hurry. They come to your government website and become your customers because they have to—not because they want to.

Your challenge is to see your website as a range of customer tasks rather than collections of content and applications. Here are some steps to help you begin:

• Step 1: Are your primary website customers known or unknown? Make your best estimate of who the different groups might be and write them down.
• Step 2: Create an Excel or Word matrix with columns for Customer Type, Task, Frequency, and Number/Percentage. Fill in your customer types and put question marks in all the other cells.
• Step 3: Now, look at your web logs. Find the most visited links.
• Step 4: If you use an online customer satisfaction survey, include the question, “What is your primary task in coming to the site today?” Look at those results.
• Step 5: Visit people who work in the areas that “own” the pages and sub-sites corresponding to the most visited links. Confirm who their primary customers are, and ask them to show you their customers’ top tasks. These people know what the top tasks are! If possible, sit next to them, watch, and ask questions.
• Step 6: Ask your call center and web managers for copies of recent customer emails, questions, and comments. Reconfirm your customer types and update the matrix.
• Step 7: On the web logs, find common search terms. Work backwards from a search term by asking, “What task did my customer want to do when he or she typed in this search term?” Put on your Sherlock Holmes hat and construct the stories of what your customers are trying to accomplish. Searching may be their last-ditch effort to complete a task.
• Step 8: As you uncover data, add it where the question marks appear in your matrix. Verify the data through conversations with others and update continually. To determine the top tasks, multiply the number or percentage of customers by the task frequency. For example,

20,000 x 1/yr = 20,000 = #1 Task

8,000 x 2/yr = 16,000 = #2 Task

• Step 9: Share your knowledge with your colleagues. You may be the first person at your agency to put it all together! Let us know what you learn and the techniques you develop. We’d like to post Best Practices for determining top tasks on HowTo.gov.