task analysis ux research

Task Analysis: What It Is and How It Improves Your UX

• Task analysis is the process of investigating the tasks users complete to achieve a desired goal or outcome.

While that sounds simple enough, task analysis is often left out of the UX design process. This is unfortunate because task analysis can actually have a big impact on design decisions.

By observing and understanding the steps users go through to complete various tasks, you can learn everything from what goals users truly want to achieve with the product you’re building to how their previous knowledge will factor into how they approach a given task.

Let’s dig deeper into why task analysis is valuable, how to go about conducting one, and how it can be used to improve UX.

• What is task analysis in UX?
• When to conduct task analysis
• Two common types of task analysis
• How to conduct a task analysis
• Using task analysis to improve UX
• Key takeaways

1. What is task analysis in UX?

Task analysis is a process that helps UX designers learn how users actually go about completing tasks with a product. 

According to Maria Rosala of the Nielsen Norman Group , “a task refers to any activity that is usually observable and has a start and an end point.” So, in task analysis, UX designers first research how users complete tasks by asking them to perform a specific activity and observing how they do so—from start to finish.

Of course, as Rosala notes, it’s important to recognize that tasks are not goals. For instance, if a user’s goal is to see a nearby dentist, their tasks may include searching for dentists in the area, learning which ones accept their insurance and ensuring there are appointments available that fit their schedule.

None of these tasks are the ultimate goal, though. The user’s goal isn’t to complete a form that details their location and insurance information. Completing the form is a means to an end: seeing a local dentist. This is important to keep in mind for UX designers because the more easily users can complete tasks that help them meet their goals, the better the user experience will be. Whether it’s streamlining the number of steps in a task, eliminating potential points of confusion with clearer messaging or innovations that will make completing a task easier, the UX designer’s focus should be on how to design the task so it enables the user to most easily and efficiently meet their goals.

2. When to conduct task analysis

Task analysis can have a big impact on key choices made throughout the design process. As a result, it should be conducted early in the process. It’s definitely not something that should happen after you’ve started making major design decisions.

Typically the process of task analysis should start during user research (which usually happens in the empathize and define stages of the UX design process); that way, your task analysis findings can be baked into other key tasks in the design process, including requirements gathering, developing content strategy and site structure, wireframing and prototyping .

3. Two common types of task analysis

There are several kinds of task analysis but the two types that are used most regularly are cognitive task analysis and hierarchical task analysis .

Cognitive task analysis

Cognitive task analysis focuses on understanding the cognitive outlay involved in completing tasks. This includes decision-making, problem-solving, memory, judgment and attention. One of the important things to keep in mind with this kind of task analysis is that depending on the user, the findings may vary from task to task.

For example, an expert user may quickly and easily find a carton of milk and place it in an online shopping cart, whereas this task will take a new user substantially longer. Cognitive task analysis enables UX designers to explore how both kinds of users complete the task and how they can make the task easier for the new user.

Hierarchical task analysis

Hierarchical task analysis is the most commonly used kind of task analysis. Hierarchical task analysis essentially involves breaking a task down into sub-tasks in order to understand the way the user interacts with a given product. UX Matters’ Peter Hornsby observes that this can help UX designers no matter what kind of project they’re working on: when creating a new product, a task analysis enables UX designers to examine different approaches to the same task and arrive at the best one, and when redesigning an existing product, it can help optimize interactions—and task completion.

Keep in mind that it’s also possible to combine these two kinds of task analysis by noting where key decisions or other cognitive factors may come into play during the subtasks outlined in a hierarchical task analysis.

In fact, there are many different things that can be accounted for when analysing a given task. Tarik Dzekman from UX Collective provides a long list that includes the context of the task, what triggers the task, how long the task takes, and how frequently the task will be performed. Dzekman cautions that it would be impossible to capture everything that plays a role in a single task through task analysis, but at a minimum most task analyses will capture the sequence of subtasks that make up a task and a description of the task.

4. How to conduct a task analysis

A task analysis consists of two discrete steps : Gathering information to determine which tasks should be analyzed and then analyzing those tasks.

Gathering information

The first step in task analysis involves user research . UX designers can use any one of a myriad of user research techniques to uncover the key tasks users perform with a product and how they go about performing them. Everything from observing a user as they complete a task to interviewing them can be employed in this step. The ultimate goal is to identify the tasks that should be analyzed.

Analyzing tasks

After the UX designer decides on the tasks to analyze, separate documents breaking down each individual task should be created. While this document can be a simple list or a detailed flowchart, it will most commonly take the form of a hierarchical task-analysis diagram. A hierarchical task-analysis diagram visually lays out the user’s goal, the tasks they must complete to achieve the goal, and the subtasks that go into each task in a visual format that shows the sequence and relationship between these things.

Note: The Nielsen Norman Group has a great example of what the process of task analysis looks like—including a task analysis diagram.

A task-analysis diagram is useful in that it helps the UX designer visualize and understand the steps a user will go through to meet a specific goal. However, this diagram should also be viewed as a living document that can be altered and adjusted.

For example, if a user’s goal is to make a purchase from an online grocery store and they want to reorder something from a past order, they will have to login to their account. However, some users may forget their password, forcing them to reset it. It would be valuable to acknowledge this potential step in the task-analysis diagram.

The need for updates and adjustments is why some UX designers prefer to use spreadsheets over diagrams for task analysis, although some use both a written list of tasks in combination with a diagram.

5. Using task analysis to improve UX

Of course, the most important thing about task analysis is that UX designers can apply what they’ve learned to their design solution, improving the user experience in the process. By understanding the steps a user goes through to complete a task, UX designers can come up with the best approach to support that task . This is valuable as it can eliminate points of confusion for the user, such as an excessive number of choices, or reduce the number of steps a user must take to complete a task.

It can also lead to innovations a UX designer may not have thought of otherwise. For example, perhaps when designing an online grocery store, a UX designer notices users heavily rely on shopping lists they keep in their mobile phones when filling their carts. This could lead the UX designer to create a way for users to sync their mobile phone’s shopping list with the store’s interface in order to streamline shopping. In referencing the task analysis, the UX designer knows they are coming up with solutions that will positively impact users’ interactions.

6. Key takeaways

You should now have a basic understanding of the task analysis. To sum it up:

• Tasks are observable activities that have a start and an end point.
• Task analysis should be conducted early in the design process, usually starting during user research.
• There are multiple kinds of task analysis, but the two that are used the most are cognitive task analysis and hierarchical task analysis.
• A task analysis is conducted in two steps. First, through user research, the UX designer will gather information that will identify the tasks to be analyzed. Second, the UX designer will create a diagram or other document to break down a task.
• UX designers apply what they’ve learned from task analysis to create the best user experience. This can lead to design improvements and innovations.

Now that you know about task analysis, you might want to learn more. If so, you’ll find the following articles useful:

• What is user research, and what’s its purpose?
• How to deal wIth cognitive load in UX and voice design
• What is the UX design process? A complete, actionable guide

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UX Task Analysis: A Complete Guide + Example

TABLE OF CONTENTS

It’s almost impossible to create an intuitive website without knowing your user’s goals and struggles along the way. But how do you find out what they are? Luckily, there is an effective way to do that — task analysis. By following this article, you will master task analysis and obtain the knowledge you need to design an efficient and user-centered product.   

Key Takeaways

➡️ Task analysis in UX means detailed mapping of how a user completes their goal using a digital product and of dependent system actions

📈 It is crucial when developing a new product or when updating an existing one

🎯 Understanding exactly how a user interacts with a system leads to design improvements, increased user satisfaction, and overall increased efficiency

🐝 To gather data for task analysis one may use methods such as interviews, contextual inquiry , task-based usability testing and more

✅ The output of a UX task analysis is most often a task analysis diagram

What is task analysis?

Task analysis is, simply put, the understanding of a user’s task. It’s a combination of understanding the user, their task, and their environment. Performing a task analysis leaves a detailed understanding of the task sequence, its complexity, environmental conditions, tools, skills, and information the user needs to perform the task to achieve their goal.

It encompasses a broad range of techniques from observations of the user in their natural environment to documenting how the users perform their tasks in an existing system. A good task analysis leads to actionable insights into user processes. This information can be directly applied in designing efficient user flows that liberate users from unnecessary work and delegate said work to the system. 

What are the types of approaches to user task analysis

There are three approaches to task analysis, which can however be combined:

• Contextual  
• Hierarchical  

Now, we will break down each approach in more detail.

Contextual task analysis

A central, key step in contextual task analysis is contextual observations/interviews. The idea is that analysts must observe and interview users in their real-life work context to understand their needs and “hot button” motivators.

Contextual analysis means obtaining a model of how a user completes a certain task, in their natural environment. This enables you to understand how the product will fit the user’s environment, actual needs, and other tools they already use.

For example, if you want to test the usability of an app for bike-sharing, you should test this with users outside, on the go. Nobody will be using this app from the comfort of their couch, on the contrary, one might expect it to be used under changeable outside light conditions or in a hurry This is a specific context within which the task analysis should be conducted.

To design products used in a distracting environment one should consider providing safeguards against unintentional errors, and including options to pick the task up again after a delay (Mayhew, 2007).

Contextual task analysis is indispensable in pinpointing novel business opportunities – “At which point can we design technology solutions that help the user do their task more efficiently?” It also helps design the product so that it can be seamlessly integrated into the user’s existing processes and it’s easy for new users to pick up.

Lastly, understanding how users already interact with existing tools helps design an interface that’s inherently familiar to the users.

Cognitive task analysis

Cognitive task analysis focuses on understanding the deeper mental processes such as decision-making, attention, memory, and judgment that a task involves . By studying users’ cognitive processes, UX researchers and designers can gain insights into how users understand, learn, and perform tasks within a given interface or system.

This technique can include UX methods such as think-aloud protocols, observational studies, user interviews, and usability testing .

Hierarchical task analysis

Hierarchical task analysis studies user behavior by breaking complex tasks down into smaller subtasks . This approach helps to gain more detailed and precise information into the process of users completing complex tasks as each step can be analyzed separately. 

Each subtask can be analyzed using either of the two methods described above or a combination of both methods. This detailed information can be later visualized in a form of a diagram that describes the steps taken to accomplish a certain larger goal.

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What is the main goal of Task Analysis in user research?

Task analysis is supposed to provide actionable insights into user processes which can be directly applied in designing efficient user flows that liberate users from unnecessary work and delegate said work to the system. It encompasses a range of techniques from observations of the users to documenting their performance.

When to do task analysis?

There are two use cases when task analysis is most beneficial:

• When developing a brand-new product
• When updating an existing system

Ideally done during all stages of the design process , task analysis is most useful at the beginning (Courage et al, 2007).

If you follow the Design Thinking process, incorporate it into the Empathize and Define stages. Doing task analysis at the beginning will ultimately save time and money during the later stages. Understanding how users work makes the design phase move much more quickly, it helps prioritize the features, and saves on testing, as the design will be more informed and fewer iterations will be needed.

However, task analysis can be just as successfully applied to updating an existing project and can still drive your updates to be more user-centric.

Preparing for a UX task analysis

The first step, of course, is to pick a specific task you want to analyze . Before starting the task analysis, decide on the scope and granularity – i.e. how much time you have, what user population you want to cover, how many types of tasks, and in how much detail you want to specify them.

Split your task into more specific tasks if needed , depending on the level of detail you decided.

For example, if you are designing a collaboration platform, you may be interested in a larger picture – understanding how work moves from person to person and the users’ general jobs. On the other hand, if your product is targeting single users who don’t interact, you may want to start with the target user’s main goals and sub-goals and move down to the breakdown of specific steps they take to achieve these goals. 

How to conduct a UX task analysis?

There are 2 main parts to a UX task analysis:

• Gather information about users
• Analyze the data

The output of a UX task analysis is a task-analysis flow diagram.

1. Task Analysis: Gathering information

The objective is to understand users’ goals, mental models, and tasks in their natural environment. Who are they? What information do they have and lack? What mental models do they have of the activities that your product covers? And most importantly – what are their goals?

These are some methods that are used:

• Contextual analysis or contextual inquiry – If you have the time and resources, bring the research to users by conducting site visits. Observing the users in their natural environment will allow you to document their steps and decisions as they solve tasks. Supplement your observations by asking questions about their goals and reasoning.
• Interviewing – Make the interview behavioral rather than attitudinal – get them to walk you through their process and explain their decisions. Ask them to show you the artifacts and tools they would normally use and let them walk you through how they would use them. Artifacts could be e.g. a calendar, notes, paper form – anything they already produce to help themselves in the task.
• Recording user activities – This might be a user taking self-recorded notes in a diary study or with the help of a tracking software such as a session recording tool .
• Focus group – A semi-structured discussion with multiple target users.  Moderate their discussion to reach a consensus on what the task steps look like, what kind of decisions they have to make along the way, and what kind of goals they are achieving.
• Task-based user testing – If you are not developing a product from scratch, but rather updating an existing one, conduct task-based usability testing and observe how users complete the tasks in the existing system. You can do this in person or remotely with the help of a usability testing tool . Keep records of all user actions, such as page views, click paths, and actions like purchase or download.

An informal task analysis is better than none. Oftentimes rigorous task analysis requires much time and effort so that one is tempted to let go of the idea completely. If interviewing, focus groups, user testing, and other techniques are unavailable to you, consider informal, unobtrusive observations of real users using a product - it will be more valuable than doing nothing.

2. Putting the Analysis into Task Analysis

A variety of tools can help you to make sense of your data: 

• Affinity diagrams – If you are just starting generative research to prioritize features of a new product, use affinity diagrams mapping users’ needs, goals, and preferences. 

• User Personas – To understand your target users, craft rich persona descriptions that contain user backgrounds, goals, needs, knowledge, and environment information. 

• Users Scenarios – Moving closer to the task itself, you can write user scenarios   – short stories starting with the user’s situation and describing the steps, tools, and artifacts the user uses to arrive at a happy ending. However, the ultimate method in hierarchical task analysis is the diagrams.

The result of a UX task analysis is most often a flow diagram.

Flow diagrams

Flow diagrams are the most important outcome of task analysis. They document the core of the task – how users interact with a system as they move through and complete their task . They illustrate the sequence of steps and the dependencies. Depending on the scope of your analysis your UX task analysis diagram can incorporate detailed elements such as detailed user decisions, interaction with other individuals, pop-up dialog elements and menu items, other tools, etc. 

For preexisting design solutions, the diagram will often be surprisingly elaborate and messy. The information from a detailed diagram allows you to see unnecessarily complicated information exchange between the system and the user and define actionable design recommendations.

A good practice for creating an organized flow diagram is color-coding the tasks so that you can immediately see which actions are done by the user and which actions are done by the system.

UX task analysis example

To make it easier for you to understand the process, we are going to walk you through a simplified example of UX task analysis on an existing system. In this example, we will be analyzing Marco, who wants to buy a new pair of jeans for the summer.

Marco’s goal: “Purchase the jeans from an online store.”

Step 1: Split the task into smaller subtasks.

• Find the jeans on the website
• Add jeans to the shopping cart
• Proceed to checkout

Step 2: Research how exactly Marco completes the subtasks using a website usability testing tool and analyze how he proceeds, or if he most often shops on a mobile device, use a mobile testing tool of course.

Step 3: Analyze Marco’s behavior and prepare data for creating a task analysis diagram.

Step 4: Create a diagram

Here’s an example of what the diagram could look like:

Step 5: Next step

Looking at the task diagram, how can we optimize the task flow to make it more efficient from Marco’s point of view? Can we reduce the number of steps, decisions, and information he needs to know?

This is where your own cutting-edge design solution comes in.

References and further reading

Courage, Reddish and Wixon: Task Analysis. In Human-Computer Interaction, 2007

Marine: Task Analysis: The Key UX Design Step Everyone Skips, https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2014/03/27/task-analysis-the-key-ux-design-step-everyone-skips/

Mayhew: Requirement Specifications within the Usability Engineering Lifecycle. In Human-Computer Interaction, 2007

Usability’s Body of Knowlege: Taks Analysis, http://usabilitybok.org/task-analysis

People also ask (FAQ)

Task analysis in UX is a systematic approach to mapping out how a user completes their task within a system . It reveals each step needed to be taken, by the user and by the system, the flow, and the dependencies. Often in task analysis larger goals are broken down into smaller subtasks which are all analyzed in detail and this approach can offer insight into any inefficiencies and possible issues.

These are the main steps of conducting a UX task analysis:

• Define a task you want to analyze
• Break the task down into smaller subtasks
• Gather information about users (e.g. task-based usability testing )
• Create a flow diagram

Task analysis is important in UX because it helps you understand your users, and their behavior when completing tasks using your digital product . This understanding can reveal potential issues and areas for improvement, guide design decisions, and support the overall efficiency of the user flow.

Hive full of creative minds, UX researchers, UX/UI designers, content writers and editors dedicated to sharing their collective knowledge and expertise with the UX community. Our content team collaborates to produce high-quality resources on a variety of topics related to UX research, UX/UI design, usability and user testing, and a lot of actionable UX tips. You can find insights and practical tips that can help businesses improve their user experience and achieve their goals in our Blog Posts and Guides . You can find articles by our staff, as well as mentions of UXtweak and our content in the top UX publications such as Smashing Magazine , Interaction Design Foundation , UX Magazine , UXmatters , UXbooth , UX Mastery, and UXtools . UXtweak and our content have also been featured by companies such as Figma , Wix , HubSpot , Elementor, Toptal , Avast , CareerFoundry , and others.

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Task analysis: How to optimize UX and improve task efficiency

Gain a fresh perspective on UX by analyzing how users approach tasks—here’s how to build a plan of action for designing goal-based user experiences.

Ella Webber

Thinking you know how users perform specific tasks within your product is very different to having data-backed insights on the ins-and-outs of how users approach your product. From goals, touchpoints, journey and overall experience—taks analysis is a unique method to understand your user’s perspective.

In this article, we’re covering all you need to know about task analysis—the process of studying and analyzing users’ jobs to be done, and how they complete those tasks—including when to do it, how to do it, and best practices according to industry experts.

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What is task analysis in UX?

Task analysis is a UX research method for mapping out how users complete a specific task within your product, e.g. paying an invoice in accounting software, or updating their picture on a social app. It identifies major decision points, cognitive load, and points of friction they encounter when completing the task.

UX researchers and designers can use task analysis insights to create more intuitive products, and the technique comes in helpful at any phase of the design process, from concept testing to prototype testing and usability testing live websites .

After watching how users approach a task, you break it down into smaller sub-tasks—giving you a clear, step-by-step understanding of their thought-process and decision-making. Once you know the steps and desired process and outcomes, you’re in a better position to identify user needs, and optimize the user experience.

What are the types of task analysis?

There’s two main types of task analysis, each of which lends itself to different objectives and stages of the UX design process . We’ve also included the pros and cons of each so you can choose the best one for your research.

Hierarchical task analysis

Cognitive task analysis.

Hierarchical task analysis is about structuring sequences. It involves creating a tree diagram or flowchart depicting a hierarchy of tasks your user needs to complete a goal.

First, you outline a main task. Then, the main task is divided into a set of sub-tasks. These sub-tasks are divided into even smaller tasks, and those are segmented further. This continues until you’re left with only the core decisions and jobs-to-be-done.

Consider these pros and cons when choosing hierarchical task analysis:

• Comprehensive, detailed view of tasks
• Clearly organizes tasks
• Helps identify dependencies and relationships between tasks
• Time consuming to break down tasks into components
• Difficult to map out for non-linear or complex tasks
• Doesn’t take into account the cognitive load for completing tasks

Users spend valuable mental energy whenever they complete tasks while interacting with your product. Cognitive task analysis seeks to observe users' underlying processes during task performance. It includes behavior, emotions, and—debatably most important—mental effort.

Since they’re more complex, cognitive task analysis representations can come in all shapes and sizes, including some of the representations included in hierarchical task analysis.

Some types include:

• Narrative descriptions: Detailed reports, documents, and descriptions of cognitive processes
• Flowcharts: Visual representations, emphasizing decision points and thought processes
• Decision trees: Diagrams highlighting the choices users can make, underlining the mental load

Some pros and cons of cognitive task analysis are:

• Offers in-depth insights on users’ mental models
• Especially useful for making more intuitive designs
• Good for mapping out complex tasks that need problem-solving
• Can be resource intensive, requiring time and effort
• No singular output method, making a deliverable complex to create
• Can sometimes overlook external or “hard” factors central to task performance

To get insights for your task analysis, you’ll need to user research to gather more information on how users achieve their goals. UX research methods like user interviews, card sorting , focus groups, UX surveys , and contextual inquiry can all be used to get insights on your user’s goals and mental models.

For example, Scott Hurff , Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Churnkey , uses a variety of methods to analyze billing-related tasks within Churnkey:

“At Churnkey, our product serves two customers: our direct customers (subscription businesses who use our platform) and then their customers.

“First, we hear about the problems being faced by our customers’ customers when dealing with billing-related topics, and then we dial down into what they’ve been trying to achieve.

“We then listen to our direct customers’ wishes about how their lives could be made easier, the roadblocks they’re facing when trying to complete certain tasks, and how to alleviate their sense of feeling overwhelmed with customer billing needs.

“Finally, we take all of these inputs, synthesize them, close-read them, and come up with new product concepts that we think will solve these problems in novel, useful ways.”

Task analysis is an adaptable technique, and you’ll likely find that a combination of UX research methods is key for getting a full picture of user experience.

The specific method you’ll opt for largely depends on what tasks you’re analyzing, and at which stage of the UX research process you’re conducting your analysis.

When to use task analysis in UX?

One of the benefits of task analysis is its versatility as a framework, offering value throughout the product development process . But before you break out the flowcharts, let’s look at when to use this technique.

1. Initial phase and discovery

Using task analysis at the beginning of the design process helps you explore and define user behavior in the context of a product. It gives your team the insights necessary for laying the foundation of user-centric design and contributes to the early stages of product research .

What task analysis can help with:

• Brainstorming solutions
• Identifying user paths and goals
• Establishing user personas and pain points

2. Usability testing and validation

During the validation phase of the design process, task analysis can aid in ensuring you’re on the right path. It acts as a framework for defining benchmarks, successes, and failures for tasks.

• Understanding user behavior and mental models
• Creating realistic user scenarios to help guide usability testing
• Identifying clear usability metrics , KPIs and decision points during user interaction

3. Iteration, improvement, and post-launch

UX teams can use task analysis as part of continuous product discovery to continuously refine a product for a better user experience. Task analysis is especially useful for identifying when and where to introduce features while maintaining user satisfaction after launch.

• Creating and accessing opportunities for new features
• Re-evaluating and updating user tasks
• Assessing overall task efficiency long-term

💡 Looking for a UX research tool to uncover task-related insights at every stage of the design and development? Maze provides a comprehensive suite of user research methods, such as card sorting , user interviews , feedback surveys , and more.

How to use task analysis in the UX design process

Now we’re clear on when to use task analysis, let’s dive into what this process looks like.

1. Set a main task to analyze

After recruiting research participants , the first step of task analysis is choosing a primary user task to analyze. The scenario that you choose should be clear, with a set beginning and end. Some examples of main tasks include feature onboarding, completing a purchase, or customizing a profile.

You’ll want to ask yourself:

• What are the user’s goals and motivations for completing the task?
• Who is performing the task? What are their skills, experience, and knowledge level?
• What’s the aim of this task analysis? What insights are you hoping to gain?

Asking yourself these questions will help you get a clear view of the main task at hand. It will also set the stage for the next important step of task analysis.

2. Select UX research methods and conduct task analysis

After you’ve defined your main task, you’ll want to gather in-depth insights showing exactly how users complete it. Choose your user research methods and conduct research into how users complete a specific task.

For hierarchical task analysis, methods like website testing, on-screen recordings, or heatmaps will give you a better understanding of how users are completing the task. They show exactly where and what your users click on to finish user processes.

If you’re more interested in cognitive task analysis, qualitative research through user interviews and surveys is the way to go. By asking users open-ended research questions , you’ll receive a wealth of information on users’ mental effort and emotions during task completion. Open card sorting can also be especially helpful for getting more context on user mental models.

3. Break your main task into smaller sub-tasks

Breaking down the main task into smaller sub-tasks is crucial for understanding each small step in user-product interactions. This is where you’ll identify any friction points, otherwise hidden away within the digital product experience.

For example, let’s say your main task is completing a purchase on the website. Some of the sub-tasks would include:

Selecting products to add to cart

• Browsing the catalog
• Selecting products by clicking on them
• Selecting product options and quantity

Accessing the shopping cart to make a purchase

• Finding the shopping cart
• Proceeding to check-out
• Typing in personal information
• Selecting a shipping method
• Deciding to save information for further purchasing

Confirming and placing the order

• Adding a payment method and securely inputting details
• Selecting options to use saved payment methods
• Accepting terms and conditions
• Confirming the order

Breaking your main task into its relevant sub-tasks enables you to understand each individual aspect and approach your tasks one step at a time. This is crucial for effectively optimizing the entire process.

Once you’ve listed out your sub-tasks, it’s time to create a visual representation that maps out decision points on your user’s journey.

4. Create a diagram to map out major decision points

Creating a diagram for task analysis gives you a comprehensive view of the user processes at work and how to improve them. Essentially, you’re taking your main task, the sub-tasks you’ve identified, and turning them into a flowchart. Flowcharts help you visualize the user’s journey through a specific task and identify opportunities for improvement.

On a flowchart, your main task will be the starting point. A simple arrow starting from the main task brings you to the first sub-task, then the second, then the third, and so on. Eventually, you’ll get down to the final step of your user’s task.

The result will look something like the image below.

With a complete flowchart, you’ll be able to identify any redundancies or inefficiencies in your digital product. It will also serve as a constant reference you can come back to for brainstorming areas for improvement.

Flowcharts are essential for hierarchical task analysis, as they clearly define what users need to do while interacting with your digital product. However, they’re only half the picture. The other half incorporates user insights into each decision, task, and friction point.

5. Create a narrative report with next steps

While flowcharts are important, they don’t give you the context surrounding particular friction points in your user’s experience. For that, you’ll need to create a narrative report—a detailed explanation of the task analysis in chronological order.

Here’s what your narrative report should include:

• Introduction: Outlining the purpose of your task analysis, the main task, and its importance
• Describing sub-tasks: With a detailed description of how each sub-task is performed with relevant insights, processes, and context
• Discuss dependencies and decision points: Explaining how subtasks are connected and the criteria for making decisions between them
• Highlight potential improvements: Including any potential friction points and improvements in sub-tasks, informed by insights
• Conclusion: Summarize your key findings and how improvements can enhance user experience and completing the main task

It’s during the elaboration of this narrative report that your UX research and data collection from the second step will come into play. Include insights you’ve collected on mental effort, decisions, and your user’s thoughts at each stage.

You’ll want to pay special attention to the key decision points throughout the task, and what you can do to remove friction and optimize the experience. Considering these issues will help formulate potential solutions to the task-related issues you’ve identified.

With this UX report , you’ll have a clearer idea of what’s next. Based on your insights, you may need to introduce new features, optimize existing ones, or redesign your task flow for a smoother experience. You’ll likely want to conduct further research once you’ve got your solutions to ensure you’re heading in the right direction.

Once your narrative report is complete, you can use it as a guide for actioning the insights you’ve collected. It’s also a key document for getting stakeholder buy-in , if applicable, and democratizing user research in your organization.

3 Best practices for effective task analysis

Knowing the rules for conducting task analysis doesn’t guarantee success—you need to keep some best practices in mind to ensure your task analysis is as fruitful as possible.

Here, Scott from Churnkey shares three best practices he uses to guide task analysis.

1. Show, don’t tell

It’s not enough to have a vague understanding of the problems your users face while interacting with your product. The more concrete examples you can get of their friction points, the better. A deep understanding of the issues they face is crucial for resolving them. And what better way to understand user issues than seeing them first-hand?

“Get on a call with a customer and have them share their screen.” Says Scott, “Have them take you through the exact steps they’re following to solve their problem with today’s method. Record the call, as typically, this ends up being the ‘ideal case’, so you’ll want to see them complete this process more than once.”

Interviews and surveys definitely have their place in task analysis, but you want to use them alongside other research methods that prioritize showing over telling.

2. Study multiple users completing the same task

Not every user will approach a task in the same way. That’s why it's helpful to test different users completing the same process. This not only ensures you’re tackling analysis effectively but also potentially reveals new friction points or solutions.

Scott suggests taking notes on the differences of each unique case:

“Whenever possible, see if you can experience how other members of a team complete the task. Take note of the little adjustments and tweaks they have to make for each unique case.

“Chances are, you’ll experience a few little ‘tricks’ they use to complete the task in a different way. Take note of the origin points of the task and its eventual destination. What problems arose along the way? How did each completion differ slightly?”

Collecting insights from a variety of users is crucial for a broad understanding of how users complete tasks. It’s essential to get a wide array of perspectives to ensure you build a solution that optimizes the process for everyone.

3. Come back to the big picture

Breaking down a main task into smaller subsets is crucial for successful analysis. However, this can make it easy to get bogged down by complex processes and decision points. Revisiting the end goal allows you to explore new avenues for potential solutions and bring the data back to your objective.

Scott notes how returning to the main task and identifying the bigger themes can help form an altogether new angle:

“Step back and take away the broad themes of the task. What’s the actual thing being done? From how many different angles can you examine the existing solution to the task, and does that offer any potential for a fresh approach?”

It’s easy to get caught up in the details, but taking a step back can give you a fresh perspective on pre-existing knowledge to improve decision-making.

Enhance your user experience with Maze

Task analysis is an effective way to get a clear view of how your users interact with your product, and is a useful analysis method at any phase of the product design process.

Performing task analysis correctly ensures every step of your user’s experience is intuitive and frictionless.

If you’re looking for a tool that can support all stages of the task analysis process—from recruiting participants to creating reports—Maze is your answer. Maze is a holistic user research platform that provides multiple research methods to uncover actionable insights.

Task analysis—like every type of user research—is a whole lot easier with the right toolkit. Try Maze today to start optimizing every step of the varying paths users take in your product.

Frequently asked questions about task analysis

The two main types of task analysis include hierarchical task analysis and cognitive task analysis However, there are other types, including goal task analysis and sequential task analysis.

What are the steps of task analysis?

The steps of task analysis entail setting a main task to analyze, gathering information on that task through UX research methods, breaking down main tasks into smaller tasks, and creating a flowchart or narrative report.

What is an example of task analysis?

Let’s say your digital product requires users to make a profile with contact information. A hierarchical task analysis would entail identifying a key process, like uploading a profile picture, and then breaking it down into smaller processes—like scrolling their gallery and selecting a picture from their camera roll. UX teams can study these processes to identify friction points and their potential solutions.

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Task Analysis 101: What Is It and How To Improve Your UX Using Task Analysis?

10 min read

Task analysis is a powerful way to timely discover and address friction points in the user experience. It helps UX designers and product managers better understand users’ goals and the steps they must take to get their job done.

Task analysis enables you to design more efficient user experiences and ultimately drive your product growth.

In this article, we’ll be covering all the necessary steps to successfully perform a task analysis.

Let’s dive in!

• Task analysis is the process of analyzing the number of steps (tasks) a user has to complete to get their jobs to be done (JTBD) when using your product.
• It helps UX designers and product managers understand user behavior and eliminate unnecessary steps in the user path.
• The primary goal of task analysis is to detect flaws in the UX design that compromise the user journey , customer engagement , and customer satisfaction.
• Cognitive task analysis will help you gauge how much mental effort is required to reach the desired outcome when using your product (aka how difficult it is for customers to use it for a given task).
• Hierarchical task analysis allows UX researchers to examine the nooks and crannies of interface design and understand how each task contributes to the users’ prime goals.
• Task analysis involves five steps.
• Defining the task that should be analyzed.
• Identifying customers’ end goals by segmenting them in the welcome flow.
• Breaking down complex tasks into small steps to find overloaded UX areas.
• Creating a task-analysis diagram based on the gathered data.
• Finding friction points and creating a strategy to fix them.

What is a task analysis in UX?

Task analysis is the process of analyzing the number of steps (tasks) a user has to complete to get their jobs to be done (JTBD) when using your product. To put it simply, task analysis breaks down complex tasks into small steps to find overloaded UX areas.

This helps take a deep dive into understanding user behavior and eliminate unnecessary steps toward completing the goals (JTBD).

The more advanced UX, the fewer friction points users encounter, and the better customer satisfaction .

Why is task analysis important in UX?

A task analysis is a process of putting yourself in the shoes of your customers and experiencing their user journey. How easy it is for them to complete the steps, what steps make them confused or upset, etc.

The end goal is to address all the downsides and deliver a best-in-class product experience.

But there’s more to it than that.

Have a deep understanding of users and their end goals

Task analysis helps UX designers and product managers to understand the whole picture of the user journey toward particular goals. You will uncover:

• What triggers lead to the task, and what steps do they take to reach the end goal?
• What does their learning process look like?
• How does their competence in performing tasks affect the speed at which they complete tasks and the overall completion rate?
• What does their everyday flow look like?
• What hinders their journey?

The sweet point is that you can conduct task analysis for any user’s goal within the product and make well-informed decisions toward product updates.

Identify how customers behave in the app

While running task analysis, you will map out all the steps users execute to achieve their goals. This gives you a clear understanding of their in-app behavior and enables you to spot roadblocks on both the product and UX layers.

See how users are influenced by their environment

Task analysis also shows how users are influenced by their in-app environment. For example, you can compare the differences in the user experience of users employing the mobile app and web version of your product.

Detect flaws and friction points

The prime goal of task analysis is to detect UX design flaws that compromise customer engagement and satisfaction.

Do you have an easy-to-use navigation menu, intuitive design prompting users to perform the next task, and workflow efficiency?

You can put everything under the test and see whether you’ve logically built your app.

Types of task analysis

There are two types of task analysis — cognitive and hierarchical analysis.

Let’s learn the pros and cons of each.

Cognitive task analysis

Cognitive task analysis (CTA) studies users’ cognitive activity when performing specific tasks. In other words, CTA aims to gauge how much mental effort is required to reach the desired outcome when using your product (aka how hard it’s for customers to use your product for a given task).

With CTA, you will understand:

• Performance differences between basic users and pro or advocates
• The extent of mental workloads
• The motivation to use your product
• The emotional side of your users engaging with your product (angry, happy, upset, confused, etc.)

The cognitive analysis consists of several steps:

• Defining the task (goal) to analyze
• Determining the critical decision points
• Grouping by user’s behavior
• Acting on findings

We can highlight two main benefits of CT analysis:

• Provides insight into user motivations
• Helps establish the participants’ end goals

Disadvantages

The main disadvantage of cognitive analysis is its qualitative nature. You may not get accurate results or relatively clear results.

Hierarchical task analysis

Hierarchical task analysis lays out every step a user performs to accomplish their goal. It involves a linear diagram like signing up → creating an account → connecting to a Facebook account. And it also breaks down every major step into smaller subtasks (tasks’ decomposition).

Thus the signing up task implies the following steps — signing up with Google → reading through a welcome screen → completing a 4-step welcome survey, etc.

The hierarchy of tasks enables UX researchers to examine the nooks and crannies of interface design and understand how each contributes to the users’ goals.

This way, you may spot that multiple tasks in the signing-up process can overwhelm users and lead to a low completion rate.

The hierarchical analysis is essential for designing new features or reverse-engineering existing ones. With this, you can explore different approaches to achieving the same goal and find the most efficient path.

At an earlier stage, hierarchical task analysis enables you to build efficient product usability. When applied later, it helps identify hidden UX flaws and address them accordingly.

There are no obvious disadvantages as such. You’re good to go as long as you do task decomposition correctly and get detailed results.

When should you perform a task analysis?

Task analysis is an essential step in the product design process. It should be done in the early stages because it helps teams frame the problem and gather user requirements.

Basically, task analysis is the foundation of the product.

In the realm, we cannot expect that once we complete task analysis, we will build the most authentic product UX ever and never return to this task again.

With the company’s growth, we build various features, incorporate new flows, etc. Hence, we must ensure that updates are aligned with existing flows and in no way hinder user experience.

Bottom line: Task analysis is an ongoing process that helps product teams design a user-friendly and appealing interface.

What data do you need for a task analysis process?

There are five pillars for task analysis. You should find answers to all of them while conducting task analysis. This will help you decompose user goals efficiently and create the fastest path to value.

• Trigger: Determine what triggers users to begin their journey. What caused the goal to occur?
• Desired Outcome: What is the desired outcome that users aim for?
• Base Knowledge: What base knowledge do users have before getting started?
• Required Knowledge: What knowledge do users lack in order to complete the task?
• Artifacts: What additional tools or information do the users rely on when performing the tasks?

Now let’s find out what a task analysis process consists of.

How to conduct a task analysis and improve UX?

In this chapter, we’ve laid out the entire task analysis process and how to act on findings.

Let’s begin.

Define the task that should be analyzed

Any analysis begins with a goal and questions behind it. Why do we need to conduct the research? What do we aim for? What is a starting point for analysis?

In our case, we must define the high-level task (the user goal) to analyze. The specific step in the user journey that users should perform (e.g., account creation).

Segment customers in the welcome flow and understand their goals

Customer segmentation refers to categorizing customers based on common characteristics for further analyses (e.g., behavior analysis , task analysis, customer journey analysis, etc.).

When it comes to task analysis, segmenting your customers from the onset gives you a deeper understanding of them. What niche they come from, how they heard about your company, what is their job to be done, etc.

To gather such data, you need to implement the welcome flow (a welcome screen ). This is a pop-up with a microsurvey that appears at the last step (or at the beginning) of the sign-up process.

Welcome screens usually serve two purposes: greeting customers and collecting data.

For example, Kontentino utilizes a welcome screen by Userpilot to define customers’ goals, workflows, and the type of company they represent.

Use feature tagging to identify what customers are doing in the app

Feature tagging is another solution to understanding what your users are doing in the app and what their path toward the goal looks like. In short, feature tagging allows you to analyze product usage behavior .

Thus, you will learn and document every click users make. What features do they use more or less frequently, etc?

With Userpilot, you can select any UI pattern of your app to track its usage.

Use this data to understand when users reach certain milestones in their journey.

Once you set up feature tracking and data starts flowing, you can segment customers by their in-app experiences (e.g., their interactions with the features).

This will help you identify segments that are having trouble with a specific feature, etc.

Set up custom goals and monitor how users are progressing toward goals

Whenever you want to know how customers feel about recent changes to a product or design, this step is crucial.

For this, you can digitize all the steps of hierarchical task analysis and track how many users complete pre-defined milestones. You can also monitor the completion rate of intermediate steps (tasks) toward goals.

This will help you measure how successful product updates were or you can identify the best performing features of your app. Additionally, you can understand what step (task) causes trouble. Essentially, these are tasks with a low completion rate of concrete action.

With Userpilot, you can create goals and track their completion. It’s code-free and can be set up in just a few clicks away.

Create a task analysis diagram based on the gathered data

Lastly, collect the new data (from the steps above) and make a graphical representation called a task-analysis diagram.

This will help understand the overall number of tasks, subtasks, sequence, and hierarchy.

The diagram will also help you analyze the complexity of the process users are going through to achieve their goals.

Ultimately, you will uncover tasks that users find insufficient.

Discover friction points and fix them to improve the user experience

Once you finish the analysis, you will locate the friction points that hurt the user experience and might lead to churn .

Regardless of what task damages the user experience, your next step is fixing the problem.

Most drawbacks arise either in the onboarding flow or in a specific part of the user journey. No matter what part of the product has flaws, it usually comes down to overcomplicated navigation and unnecessary steps to get to value.

The next time you’re working on a new design, do UX research first. Interview customers, analyze competitors’ UX , and run task analysis. Make your UX flawless by using as many methods as you can.

Task analysis example

Here we will show you how bad UX can drastically impair the overall user experience.

Let’s look at two tools for keyword research (SEO) Semrush and Serpstat.

Our goal is to run a quick analysis of the most important components of SEO. Keywords our site ranks for and the number of backlinks.

We will be testing both tools and running a small task analysis to compare their UX.

Type the query → Click on “Search” → Done! The tool shows me the needed metrics from the first screen.

But let’s make the task more difficult. Now, I want to analyze my Anchor text list.

Click on “Backlinks” from the Domain Overview → View Details → Anchors. Three clicks and you’re on the destination page.

Takeaways: Super intuitive design. Flawless path to get to value. It took less than 10 seconds to open the needed report.

Type the query → Click on “Search” → scroll six screens down to reach the Backlinks overview → click on “Backlinks” → scroll two screens down → fail!

No jump link will get you to the Anchor report.

The workaround is to click “Anchor” from the navigation menu.

Takeaways: Not friendly and not intuitive design. It took up to 40 seconds to realize the next step to reach the objective and some cognitive and emotional effort (irritation).

As you can see, task analysis is crucial if your goal is to build an outstanding product on the market.

Conducting a task analysis is important if you don’t want a bad UX to impair the user experience and lead to high churn.

Ideally, you should analyze customer behavior and understand your users’ needs and goals before creating a product or updating an existing feature.

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Using task analysis to improve your UX design

Users often face unique problems that require an in-depth understanding from the UX team. Sometimes those problems are broad, and we can analyze them using frameworks such as user journeys or Jobs-to-be-Done. These methods focus on understanding the user’s high-level goals and motivations. However, to address user problems on a more granular level, this is where task analysis comes in.

Task analysis is focused on understanding the details of how users interact with a product and identifying areas for improvement. This includes breaking down a task into smaller steps and understanding how each contributes to the overall user experience.

Conducting a task analysis can help designers gain a deeper understanding of where users struggle when completing a task. The end goal is to optimize the task to remove pain points and make it easier for users to complete.

In this article, we’ll talk about the process of conducting a task analysis, as well as best practices and the benefits of using task analysis to inform design decisions.

Table of contents

What is task analysis, why conduct task analysis, when should you conduct task analysis, steps to conducting task analysis, using task analysis to inform ux decisions, engaging stakeholders in task analysis.

Task analysis is a method that breaks down complex tasks into smaller steps with the goal of improving the user experience. It’s a tool that helps designers better understand users’ experiences when completing certain tasks within a product. It is closely related to UX research methods, such as user interviews, surveys, and usability testing. These methods provide information about user needs and behaviors that inform the task analysis process.

By using a combination of research methods, designers can gain a comprehensive understanding of the user experience and identify areas for improvement. Overall, analyzing tasks on a deeper level allows designers to alleviate pain points and create products that better meet user needs.

Task analysis can be especially useful to understand how users are receiving your product. It can uncover the reasons behind poor performance metrics, such as high drop-off rates or low conversion rates.

By breaking down complex tasks into smaller steps, designers can easily identify areas or pain points where users may get stuck or encounter challenges. This knowledge can then be used to focus on the real issues at hand and provide solutions or recommendations. As designers incrementally improve their product’s experiences based on the information gathered from task analysis, it can lead to increased user satisfaction and a greater likelihood of user retention. Ultimately, task analysis can be used to support the business in achieving its objectives.

Task analysis should be conducted early in the design process because it provides insights into user needs, goals, and behaviors that inform the design of a product or service.

Ideally, task analysis should be conducted before design work begins because it helps designers create more user-friendly interfaces from the start. By gathering information from users about how they complete similar tasks within different tools, designers can make better-informed design decisions when building experiences within their own products.

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Task analysis can also be conducted throughout the design process; it provides valuable insights into user behaviors and pain points that may not be immediately apparent. For example, suppose usability testing reveals that users are struggling with a specific task. In that case, a designer can conduct a task analysis to identify the steps causing difficulties and recommend ways to improve them.

In general, task analysis should be conducted whenever a designer needs to gain a deeper understanding of the user experience and identify opportunities for improvement. By conducting task analysis early and often, designers can create optimal experiences that are tailored to the needs of their users.

Conducting a task analysis involves a structured process that includes several key steps. Here are the steps involved in conducting a task analysis and how each step can be applied in practice.

1. Understand the user personas

Personas are a representation of your users and are based on real-life user behaviors, goals, and motivations. They are often used to help designers understand their target audience and how they interact with their products. Sometimes, a product will have multiple user types, such as an administrator and a contributor.

By creating user personas, designers can better understand the different ways users might approach a task. Each user type may have specific needs and goals. This can help tailor the design to the target persona and ensure that the product meets the needs of each persona.

2. Identify the user’s goals

The next step in conducting a task analysis is to identify the user’s goals. This can be done by conducting user research, such as interviews or surveys, to understand what the user is trying to achieve by using a product. For example, a user on a clothing website may have the goal of purchasing a new jacket.

3. Identify the tasks involved

Once the user’s goals have been identified, the next step is to identify the tasks that the user needs to complete in order to achieve those goals. Break down the goal into several tasks that a user would take within the product.

Task flow diagrams can be useful in mapping out the tasks involved in completing a goal. Continuing with the clothing website example, a user may go through the following tasks in order to reach their goal.

• Enter website
• Filter by clothing type
• View and compare jackets
• Add a jacket to the cart
• Review the cart

Here is an example of those tasks outlined in a task flow diagram.

4. Break tasks down into steps

After identifying the tasks, break them down into smaller, more manageable steps.

For example, the task of viewing and comparing different jackets could be broken down into steps such as selecting two jackets to view details, expanding the product details, adding both jackets to a comparison tool, and analyzing the comparison table based on important features.

5. Analyze the steps

The final step is to analyze the steps in the task to identify pain points, bottlenecks, or other obstacles that users may encounter. This can be done by observing users as they complete the task, conducting usability testing, or gathering feedback through surveys or interviews. For example, designers may discover from research that users are struggling to find the product comparison button and may need to optimize the functionality to make it more accessible.

Once the task analysis results have been gathered, designers can use this information to make design decisions that will positively impact key UX performance metrics such as user engagement, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction.

For example, if a task analysis reveals that users are struggling with a specific step in a process, designers can focus their efforts on improving that particular aspect of the user flow. This gives designers a starting point for improving the overall experience which might involve simplifying the process, adding explanatory text or visuals, or reordering steps to make the flow more intuitive.

Similarly, if a task analysis shows that users are abandoning the product or service at a particular point in the user journey, designers can use this information to identify pain points and make changes that will reduce user churn. This might involve development work to improve the loading speed of pages or reducing the number of steps required to complete a task.

For further analysis, consider factors such as the number of steps in the task, frequency of performing the task, and cognitive complexity. This information can be used to streamline the process and remove unnecessary steps, enhance user comfort, and design a more efficient experience.

By using the results of a task analysis, designers can target specific areas within a task or even redesign the task itself. This, in turn, can lead to improved user engagement, higher conversion rates, increased customer satisfaction, or other key performance metrics that are set by the organization.

Involving stakeholders in task analysis can provide insights into the target audience’s needs, which can be helpful if your team lacks the resources to conduct research with actual users. Roles such as business consultants or product managers often speak directly with clients about how the product meets their needs.

Designers should also leverage their research team to conduct user interviews or other initiatives that could help understand their users. User researchers are knowledgeable in the different methods that can be used to gather the right type of information.

For example, if the goal is to understand a user’s behavior over a period of time, a diary study could be conducted to capture daily routines and the frequency of performing certain tasks. Or perhaps a user survey could be used to evaluate usability, clarity, and overall satisfaction of key tasks within a product.

After gathering information from stakeholders or directly from users, synthesize the data in order to identify common themes among user pain points and frustrations. A good method to synthesize large amounts of data is by using affinity diagrams , which enables designers to categorize information by clustering the gathered data.

Once the themes or categories emerge from the synthesis, focus on these during your next design iteration. Iterating based on feedback is critical to optimizing tasks within a product. By making necessary changes and improvements, designers can incrementally improve UX performance metrics.

Task analysis is an essential tool for identifying usability problems and improving experiences within a product. By breaking down tasks into smaller steps, designers can identify pain points to focus on. This information can be used to inform future design decisions, optimize task flows, and increase user satisfaction.

Also, involving stakeholders and users in the task analysis process can provide various ways of gathering user information, which can lead to valuable insights. Ultimately, integrating task analysis into the design process should not be ignored as it can lead to better user outcomes.

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Task Analysis Method

Task analysis is the process of observing users in action to understand in detail how they perform tasks to achieve their intended goals. Tasks analysis helps you identify the tasks that your website and applications must support in order to meet users’ needs.

Insight gained from task analysis can help you:

• refine or re-define your site’s navigation
• develop an effective site structure
• define and fine tune search functionality and search scope
• define success criteria for usability testing

Preparation

Task Analysis is often more effective when it is informed by these complementary methods.

Stakeholder Interviewing

Understanding the perspective and influence of those invested in a project's success

Use market research, competitive analysis, and web metrics analysis to help you decide which tasks are the most important to analyze. The analysis process focuses on decomposing high level tasks down into smaller subtasks and individual actions. Examining these steps in detail helps you better understand user motivations, challenges, and workarounds.

• Identify the task to be analyzed.
• Break this high-level task down into 4 to 8 subtasks.  The subtask should be specified in terms of objectives and, between them, should cover the whole area of interest.
• Draw a layered task diagram of each subtask, ensuring that it is complete.
• Produce a written account as well as the decomposition diagram.
• Present the analysis to someone else who has not been involved in the decomposition but who knows the tasks well enough to check for consistency.

Task Analysis typically produces insight and solutions focused on these areas:

Mental Model

The user's conceptualization of how a product, system, or service works.

User Behavior

Information about how users currently use a site, service, or resource.

The outcomes that users hope to accomplish with a site, service, or resource.

Define the concepts and relationships that inform effective structured content design

Category Design

Creating structures and schemes that make the location and use of content clear

Persona Creation

Development of research-informed representations of target user goals, behaviors, and pain points

Card Sorting

Card sorting is a method used to help design or evaluate the information architecture of a site

Define a system for labeling and classifying content to make it easier to find, understand, and use

Interface illustration that focuses on prioritization, functionality, and behavior

Task Analysis Method details last edited on Wednesday, January 12, 2022

• What is task analysis?

Last updated

28 February 2023

Reviewed by

Miroslav Damyanov

Every business and organization should understand the needs and challenges of its customers, members, or users. Task analysis allows you to learn about users by observing their behavior. The process can be applied to many types of actions, such as tracking visitor behavior on websites, using a smartphone app, or completing a specific action such as filling out a form or survey.

In this article, we'll look at exactly what task analysis is, why it's so valuable, and provide some examples of how it is used.

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Task analysis is learning about users by observing their actions. It entails breaking larger tasks into smaller ones so you can track the specific steps users take to complete a task.

Task analysis can be useful in areas such as the following:

Website users signing up for a mailing list or free trial. Track what steps visitors typically take, such as where they find your site and how many pages they visit before taking action. You'd also track the behavior of visitors who leave without completing the task.

Teaching children to read. For example, a task analysis for second-graders may identify steps such as matching letters to sounds, breaking longer words into smaller chunks, and teaching common suffixes such as "ing" and "ies." 

• Benefits of task analysis

There are several benefits to using task analysis for understanding user behavior:

Simplifies long and complex tasks

Allows for the introduction of new tasks

Reduces mistakes and improves efficiency

Develops a customized approach

• Types of task analysis

There are two main categories of task analysis, cognitive and hierarchical.

Cognitive task analysis

Cognitive task analysis, also known as procedural task analysis, is concerned with understanding the steps needed to complete a task or solve a problem. It is visualized as a linear diagram, such as a flowchart. This is used for fairly simple tasks that can be performed sequentially.

Hierarchical task analysis

Hierarchical task analysis identifies a hierarchy of goals or processes. This is visualized as a top-to-bottom process, where the user needs top-level knowledge to proceed to subsequent tasks. A hierarchical task analysis is top-to-bottom, as in Google's example following the user journey of a student completing a class assignment .

What is the difference between cognitive and hierarchical task analysis?

There are a few differences between cognitive and hierarchical task analysis. While cognitive task analysis is concerned with the user experience when performing tasks, hierarchical task analysis looks at how each part of a system relates to the whole.

• When to use task analysis

A task analysis is useful for any project where you need to know as much as possible about the user experience. To be helpful, you need to perform a task analysis early in the process before you invest too much time or money into features or processes you'll need to change later.

You can take what you learn from task analysis and apply it to other user design processes such as website design , prototyping , wireframing , and usability testing .

• How to conduct a task analysis

There are several steps involved in conducting a task analysis.

Identify one major goal (the task) you want to learn about. One challenge is knowing what steps to include. If you are studying users performing a task on your website, do you want to start the analysis when they actually land on your site or earlier? You may also want to know how they got there, such as by searching on Google.

Break the main task into smaller subtasks. "Going to the store" might be separated into getting dressed, getting your wallet, leaving the house, walking or driving to the store. You can decide which sub-tasks are meaningful enough to include.

Draw a diagram to visualize the process. A diagram makes it easier to understand the process.

Write down a list of the steps to accompany the diagram to make it more useful to those who were not familiar with the tasks you analyzed.

Share and validate the results with your team to get feedback on whether your description of the tasks and subtasks, as well as the diagram, are clear and consistent.

• Task analysis in UX

One of the most valuable uses of task analysis is for improving user experience (UX) . The entire goal of UX is to identify and overcome user problems and challenges. Task analysis can be helpful in a number of ways.

Identify the steps users take when using a product. Can some of the steps be simplified or eliminated?

Finding areas in the process that users find difficult or frustrating. For example, if many users abandon a task at a certain stage, you'll want to introduce changes that improve the completion rate.

Hierarchical analysis reveals what users need to know to get from one step to the next. If there are gaps (i.e., not all users have the expertise to complete the steps), they should be filled.

• Task analysis is a valuable tool for developers and project managers

Task analysis is a process that can improve the quality of training, software, product prototypes, website design, and many other areas. By helping you identify user experience, you can make improvements and solve problems. It's a tool that you can continually refine as you observe results.

By consistently applying the most appropriate kind of task analysis (e.g., cognitive or hierarchical), you can make consistent improvements to your products and processes. Task analysis is valuable for the entire product team, including product managers , UX designers , and developers .

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Task analysis.

Task Analysis is a method of observing participants in action performing their tasks. Task Analysis helps figuring out how users perform tasks and how a system, product or service should be designed for users so that they can achieve their intended goals. Task Analysis also helps determine what user goals are i.e. what designers must design for; how do users determine or measure the completion of tasks, what sort of personal, social as well as cultural attributes influence the user’s performance, etc.

Quick details: Task Analysis

Structure: Structured

Preparation: Respondent recruitment, Tasks outline, Recording tools

Deliverables: Recordings, Transcripts, Data

More about Task Analysis

Task analysis can be used in a number of situations such as when we are designing a website, when we want to test a prototype and task analysis can also be part of user testing/validation. It is important that task analysis is performed during or before the design phase so that the insights obtained can be easily incorporated into the product, service or system being designed.

Task Analysis can be performed one on one or online depending on the project under consideration. In order to analyze the way a user performs tasks, complicated and time consuming tasks can be broken down into subtasks, which can be analyzed as well as observed individually.

Types of Task Analysis

Task Analysis is of two types depending on the end-goal and composition. If the task analysis involves analyzing qualitative end-goals such as decision-making, emotions, problem-solving skills, recall, then it is termed as Cognitive Task Analysis. Whereas, if the Task Analysis involves breaking down a complex task into subtasks, analyzing the subparts and deducing the nature of the whole based on its composite parts, then such analysis is termed as Hierarchical Task Analysis.

Advantages of Task analysis

1. great understanding of users and their end-goals.

Task analysis allows the researcher to not only understand the participants end goals but also their competence in performing the task, the triggers that lead to the task, the triggers that disrupt the user’s flow during the task as well as the tools the user employs to perform the task.

2. High level understanding of user environments

Task Analysis also gives an indication of the user’s environment and whether or not the environment is conducive to perform the task .

3. Relevant at every stage of the project

Task Analysis can be conducted at any stage of the product or service development but the earlier it is conducted, the better.

4. Practical

Task analysis helps to highlight the practical aspects that come into play when a user is performing a task .

5. Determine gaps between set processes and actual steps in performing a task

This method also helps figure whether there is a difference between the way the user actually performs the task and the way the user says they perform the task .

Disadvantages of Task analysis

1. time consuming.

If the task analysis were performed with a large sample of participants, the activity would be time consuming. Online tools may help is recording data but actual observation will happen when the researcher is present at the time the task is being performed.

2. Complex findings

Depending on whether the task analysis method is cognitive or hierarchical, the findings may be complex and not that easily analyzable.

3. Discrepancy in the pace of performing the task

If the users do not give sufficient time for performing a task during the exercise, then the system or product can be off from what the user requirement is. This may be due to the users rushing through a task during the exercise which they otherwise perform at a relaxed pace. This would be true even when the user performs a task hastily otherwise but during the exercise, performs it in a relaxed manner.

4. Diverse Viewpoints

If the scope of the project is large, then user testing may result in large amount of diverse data may be difficult to collate and analyze .

Think Design's recommendation

Task Analysis goes a long way in enhancing the usability of your product/ organization if done correctly. Use this as a method if your objective is to assist users in performing their tasks or if you are intending to improve organizational efficiency by understanding the tasks and then optimizing them. 

Consider the following recommendations to improve the impact of your task analysis exercise:

• Understanding linkages and hierarchy of tasks is important to get a bird’s eye perspective. Map your understanding in a hierarchical flow-chart and then use that to analyze.
• More often than not, there are handoffs involved during tasks. Understand those handoffs and mapping people to tasks will improve your understanding of the kind of organization you are working for. More importantly, this will give you the linkages among people, tasks and systems/tools which are much needed while redefining a product/ organization.
• The purpose of this exercise is to understand the current state and how this could become a baseline for the future state. Hence, Task Analysis should be done as an analysis than a documentation of what is existing. Always question why the tasks are being done the way they are being done and find out how the situation can be improved.
• As a UX practitioner, you are dealing with emotions of the user and you want to make amends in the areas where users are frustrated. When you map out tasks, it might greatly help if you also capture emotions while performing those tasks.

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Related methods.

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• Business Model Canvas
• Ethnography
• Guided Tour
• Participatory Design
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Task Analysis – How to Find UX Flaws

A task analysis is a vital user research method for understanding how users complete tasks, including what triggers them to start, their actions, and how they know when it’s complete.

Mapping these tasks allows designers to empathize with users by analyzing their actions, struggles, and environmental influences while pinpointing opportunities within user flows to improve a product’s user experience.

Table of contents

What is the purpose of a task analysis, hierarchical task analysis, cognitive task analysis, when to conduct a task analysis, phase 1: research, phase 2: break the task into subtasks, phase three: analyze the task and subtasks, what’s next, examples of task analysis, improve task analysis with uxpin.

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What is Task Analysis?

Task analysis is a research framework for analyzing users’ steps and behaviors to complete a task. While this is a standard UX research methodology , people use task analysis in many industries, including physical products, industrial design, health and safety, and education, to name a few.

Designers must consider multiple human characteristics, including mindset, emotional state, environment, and limitations ( cognitive and physical ). They also look at the frequency, complexity, time on task, and other related factors for a holistic map of the task and surrounding influences.

A task analysis aims to understand tasks and processes from a user’s perspective and the problems the digital product must solve. If a design doesn’t solve these problems or prioritize features correctly, it won’t adequately meet user needs and possibly fail.

For example, an onboarding sequence requires users to upload a profile picture, but during a task analysis, designers realize some people don’t have a profile picture or want to take a fresh pic for the app. Adding a feature to take a selfie using the user’s smartphone camera within the app solves this problem while streamlining the onboarding process.

A task analysis also tells designers what they must not build –features that users won’t need or use. Understanding what a product doesn’t need is just as important because it simplifies the user experience and reduces costs.

Types of Task Analysis

There are two types of task analysis in UX design:

A hierarchical task analysis breaks an entire process into individual steps and identifies and prioritizes the subtasks within each phase from starting point to completion.

For example, the first step in a user flow is to sign into the app. This first step has three subtasks:

• Enter username
• Enter password
• Click/tap “Log In” button

Prioritization is key during a hierarchical analysis because it identifies what users need and when.

A hierarchical analysis will also tell designers if there are too many subtasks within a step, which may overwhelm users making the task difficult to complete.

Where a hierarchical task analysis identifies the steps and subtasks, a cognitive task analysis seeks to observe the user’s actions, emotions, and behavior throughout the process.

Designers focus on the mental effort that’s required to complete each step and subtask (smaller steps) to understand the product’s intuitiveness and identify any pain points.

Flowcharts allow designers to map tasks from start to finish, noting each critical decision point. At these decision-making moments, designers note the user’s emotion and behavior, usually with keywords– i.e., angry, frustrated, happy, confused, disengaged, etc.

Often these queues come from how users react, like someone scrunching their face in confusion when trying to complete a task or action. Designers can use these opportunities to ask questions and pinpoint what is wrong.

Design teams conduct task analysis throughout a product’s lifecycle. It’s an essential tool in the early stages of the design process when researchers are trying to frame the problem correctly.

Researchers use task analysis results to create customer journeys , and user flows that guide ideation and prototyping.

How to Conduct a Task Analysis

Below is a typical task analysis process and the outcomes design teams seek to achieve.

The research phase involves gathering data to define the specific task and users . Typical UX research methods for a task analysis include:

• Field studies: Going to locations where users use a product to understand the environment and external factors–for example, going to an airport to observe travelers using a check-in and boarding app.
• Diary studies : Users document using your product over a period. This research method is a good alternative to field studies when users don’t typically use a product in one location.
• User interviews : UX researchers talk to end-users to understand how they complete tasks, including the user’s goal, what triggers them to start, each step, and pain points/frustrations.
• Usability testing : Designers build a prototype of the user flow (task) and test it with end users, noting each step, behavior/reactions, and how users complete the task (often, there is more than one way).
• Product analytics: Tools like Google Analytics allow design teams to conduct a User Flow Analysis to understand users’ steps to complete tasks. This analytics data is excellent for pinpointing dropoffs and bottlenecks to research further.

Researchers must aim to answer four key questions during the research phase to prepare for the task analysis:

• Trigger: what triggers users to start the task? This trigger could be internal (like an emotion) or external (like a time of day or event).
• Desired outcome (end goal): what does the user want to achieve? How do they know when the task is complete?
• Knowledge: what skill or knowledge must users have to start and complete the task? For example, if your product is only in English, they must know the language.
• Artifacts: what tools and information will users need to complete this task? i.e., credit card details, passport number, etc.

Designers break the task into steps and subtasks using a task analysis diagram ( hierarchical task-analysis diagram ) or flowchart. You can create these artifacts using a whiteboard and sticky notes, a digital tool like Miro , or UXPin’s User Flows built-in library .

UXPin’s User Flows library allows design teams to build task analysis flowcharts and diagrams, including components for:

• Flow lines: movement and direction through the task
• Blocks: various types and colors to represent steps, actions, and decision-making
• Icon blocks: system feedback, including errors, success, info, warning, etc.
• Labels: for flow lines and steps
• Devices: graphical representations for laptops, desktops, smartphones, tablets, etc.
• Gestures: standard mobile gestures for taps, swipes, and scrolls

Creating task analysis flowcharts and diagrams in UXPin keeps all UX artifacts in one tool, making it easier to archive, share and collaborate. UXPin’s Comments allow design teams to collaborate internally or seek input from product managers, engineers, and other stakeholders.

The last step is to analyze the task and subtasks and add supplementary data about the process and its impact on users. They may note these details on the flowchart or task analysis diagram or create a separate artifact telling a story–similar to a user journey map .

During this analysis, designers look at the following:

• The number of steps and subtasks –are there too many? Are there any redundant tasks? Are there opportunities to reduce and streamline?
• Time-on-task –how long does it take to complete the task and subtasks? What can designers do to reduce this time?
• Task frequency –how often do users complete this task ( hourly, daily, monthly, etc.)? Are there any repetitive actions designers can eliminate (adding a feature to save someone’s personal information)?
• Physical effort –what do users have to do physically to complete tasks? How does this physical effort impact accessibility and users with disabilities?
• Cognitive effort –the task and subtasks’ impact on cognition and the mental processes required (cognitive task analysis).

Once design teams complete the task analysis, they’ll have a visualization of the user flow, bottlenecks, and pain points. They can use this research artifact to continue the design process , usually moving into the ideation and low-fidelity prototyping phase .

Here are several high-level task analysis examples you can use as experiments to test your knowledge. 

• Getting car insurance quotes
• Creating a social media post
• Ordering food through a food delivery app
• Finding a plumber to fix a broken pipe
• Purchasing an online course

Prototyping is crucial for usability testing and observing user behavior. Without the right tools, designers can’t replicate real-world product experiences, limiting what they can learn through prototyping.

UXPin’s advanced prototyping capability enables designers to build fully functioning replicas of the final product, including mimicking complex tasks like eCommerce checkouts, form validation, and API calls, to name a few.

Usability participants can interact with UXPin prototypes exactly how they would using the final product, resulting in accurate testing and meaningful feedback during the task analysis research phase.

These results allow designers to confidently identify task pain points and opportunities for improvement, thus improving design project outcomes.

Improve your task analysis with accurate prototyping and testing using UXPin. Sign up for a free trial to explore UXPin’s advanced features.

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Cognitive Task Analysis

Literature on cognitive task analysis.

Here’s the entire UX literature on Cognitive Task Analysis by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Cognitive Task Analysis

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Hierarchical Task Analysis: Understanding How Users Achieve Their Goals

Hierarchical task analysis is a systematic method used by UX designers to evaluate the user steps of an existing system or, alternatively, how they might function when creating a new product. This valuable tool uncovers the multiple tasks required to achieve a specific goal.

Typically, it is used as a discussion platform for product assessment, development, and creation, but has various alternative valuable uses; for example, producing journey maps and prototypes, training and onboarding new staff to software and operational systems, or as a communication tool when examining user interaction.

It was originally used within Human Factors Engineering to evaluate and improve human performance but has been adapted to great effect as a UX design and research method. In hierarchical task analysis, we explore major tasks (carried out to achieve goals through relevant scenarios) known as operations in Human Factors Engineering.

The definition of hierarchical task analysis:

Hierarchical task analysis (HTA) is a structured approach to mapping the steps required for a user to achieve a specific goal. It delivers an easy-to-understand guide of how a system operates and can be used in various ways for differing applications.

Ultimately, hierarchical task analysis enables UX designers, researchers, and developers to understand what a system does and how it does it. It also delivers valuable insights into users’ needs and operations, uncovering pain points and alternative ways to complete specific tasks or utilise tools.

According to the Nielsen Norman Group , “Task analysis is the systematic study of how users complete tasks to achieve their goals. This knowledge ensures products and services are designed to efficiently and appropriately support those goals.”

Why use hierarchical task analysis?

• For analysing tasks within a hierarchical structure.
• To objectively compare different approaches to the same task.
• To measure task performance, providing a risk assessment of human error within users tasks.
• To capture multiple implementations of a reusable UX design pattern applicable for further interactions and operations.

Ultimately, we use hierarchical task analysis to understand and improve the user experience of products and systems. It allows us to directly observe user interaction, behaviours, thought processes, and feelings.

Displaying a product’s hierarchical structure is an excellent method for presenting complicated tasks and complex systems, providing a clear visual map of the many steps taken as users complete tasks.

With this deeper understanding, we use the information we gather to improve such systems and user interfaces or to create efficient new systems, journey maps, and more.

One of the key uses of hierarchical task analysis is to observe the different ways users complete tasks. There are often several ways to achieve the same goal or parent task. Describing user interactions to detail how they achieve goals provides options for streamlining and improving each structured approach.

What are the key elements of a hierarchical task analysis?

• User goal or primary task – The overall objective of the task, highlighting user needs or studying the tasks users must complete to achieve product and shareholder goals.
• Subtasks – Charts or lists that outline the task structure.
• The task hierarchy plan – Documents that outline the task sequence.

Each primary task—defined by its goal—is broken into a list of subtasks, with a separate plan that specifies the order in which they are carried out.

Task hierarchy

The primary tasks outline the basic steps required to complete the goal through a specific numbering scheme, with their subtasks broken into specific, separate steps. The detail and number of subtasks depend on the depth of analysis deemed necessary by the study operators.

• 1.1.1 Subtask step
• 1.1.2 Subtask step
• 1.1.3 Subtask step (etc.)
• 1.2.1 Subtask step
• 1.2.2 Subtask step
• 1.2.3 Subtask step (etc.)
• 1.3.1 Subtask step
• 1.3.2 Subtask step
• 1.3.3 Subtask step (etc.)
• 1.4.1 Subtask step
• 1.4.2 Subtask step
• 1.4.3 Subtask step (etc.)

The hierarchical task analysis plan

The plan is typically a separate document outlining the order of the subtask steps. For example, if we consider a goal of buying a product, subtasks would include locating an item, adding the item to the basket, entering the checkout system, entering the necessary customer, delivery, and payment details, and finally completing the purchase. However, as the customer enters the checkout system, they could have options to continue as a guest, register a new account, or log in using an existing account.

The plan would dictate the order of the subtasks depending on which option the user preferred. Additional options, for example, might include using PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay to streamline the checkout system, using already completed delivery addresses and customer details. Perhaps another option would include a one-click express purchase option for already logged-in registered users. A plan considers all such multiple tasks and maps out the relevant route through their complex tasks.

The plan specifies the relevant subtasks and subtask steps for each alternative option, where the task hierarchy diagram includes all the stages and steps in a linear order. For example, the HTA diagram will include all the streamlined payment options in a list:

• 1 Enter the checkout system
• 1.1.1 (and more) PayPal subtasks
• 1.2.1 (and more) Apple Pay subtasks
• 1.3.1 (and more) Google Pay subtasks
• 1.1.1 (and more) guest user subtasks
• 1.1.1 (and more) customer registration subtasks
• 1.1.1 (and more) existing user login subtasks

The plan for our fictional checkout system specifies that the user must execute step 1.2 to use Apple Pay. Depending on the depth and detail of the task analysis, the Apple Pay option will have its own list of tasks beginning at 1.2.1, guiding the reader through that part of the system process.

Presenting your HTA analysis

There are various ways to present a hierarchical task analysis: using a standard flow chart, operation-sequence diagrams, detailed lists, illustrations, screengrabs, or, ideally, combinations of each are ideal to produce a comprehensive graphical representation of the task steps.

Each task analysis will include the reason and goals behind the exploration, the observational methods, and the information gathered about each task performance. All this information will be compiled into an easily digestible set of diagrams, lists, and plans. A consistent approach is required from team members to ensure an easy-to-understand direct comparison between use case approaches.

Hierarchical task analysis UX tools

We can utilise various standard UX research tools as task analysis methods. Experienced practitioners will be able to match the ideal option to the needs of each study.

• Contextual inquiry allows researchers to monitor users performing tasks in their usual environment.
• Critical incident technique interviews provide information about how and when users faced specific issues and tasks while using the product.
• Usability testing – Users are observed as they complete tasks.
• Diary studies and record keeping can help uncover the regular tasks users carry out and their associated issues.
• Activity sampling allows researchers to monitor and record users over time to discover product and task operation duration and frequency.
• Simulations allow researchers to walk through the task steps users typically take.

Observation is a crucial part of hierarchical task analysis research. Interviews and surveys aren’t as efficient in uncovering many of the valuable insights designers need to consider to enhance product UX.

How do you conduct a hierarchical task analysis?

Typical steps for a hierarchical task analysis include:

1. Preparation and research

Your preparation should include the consideration of user needs, users tasks, pain points, target users, and how the system functions in its typical use.

2. Define the reason behind your task analysis

Why do you need to map out the system structure? This will guide the areas you must explore and the required task steps.

3. Build an initial flow chart

Given the complex tasks and systems of digital products, building a complete hierarchical task analysis becomes an iterative process. Initially, you should focus on each task step required to complete the given task, considering the interactions between different system components.

4. Develop each sub-task and smaller sub-tasks

As you collect data, add further detail to develop the diagram and deliver a clear understanding of the complete tree structure.

5. Iterate: review and repeat

Review the finished version with stakeholders and users to check for missing steps or sub-goals, ensuring the finished version is a complete study. If further steps are required, consider which other methods you can use to uncover the relevant data.

6. Deliver the report and your recommendations

Your report is merely a single step in the design process. Each HTA is a tool to help understand the system and how users manage simple and complex tasks. Your report reviews its performance and suggests ways and areas of improvement to enhance operation, user interactions, and, ultimately, its success in the marketplace.

Hierarchical task analysis is an incredibly useful tool for examining digital products with complex systems to explore and develop the goals and tasks users interact with. It’s a relatively straightforward and standard practice amongst UX designers and researchers and delivers valuable insights for procedure development, journey mapping, and defining its ideal user personas.

Used hand-in-hand with other standard UX observational methods, we can deliver a graphical representation of the map we need to navigate and upgrade performance and user experience.

Our user research experts are available to help you get closer to your customers. If you would like to arrange a no obligation call, get in touch by emailing us at [email protected] or share your requirement using the form below.

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The Complete Guide to UX Research Methods

UX research provides invaluable insight into product users and what they need and value. Not only will research reduce the risk of a miscalculated guess, it will uncover new opportunities for innovation.

By Miklos Philips

Miklos is a UX designer, product design strategist, author, and speaker with more than 18 years of experience in the design field.

PREVIOUSLY AT

“Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.” —Tim Brown, CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO

User experience (UX) design is the process of designing products that are useful, easy to use, and a pleasure to engage. It’s about enhancing the entire experience people have while interacting with a product and making sure they find value, satisfaction, and delight. If a mountain peak represents that goal, employing various types of UX research is the path UX designers use to get to the top of the mountain.

User experience research is one of the most misunderstood yet critical steps in UX design. Sometimes treated as an afterthought or an unaffordable luxury, UX research, and user testing should inform every design decision.

Every product, service, or user interface designers create in the safety and comfort of their workplaces has to survive and prosper in the real world. Countless people will engage our creations in an unpredictable environment over which designers have no control. UX research is the key to grounding ideas in reality and improving the odds of success, but research can be a scary word. It may sound like money we don’t have, time we can’t spare, and expertise we have to seek.

In order to do UX research effectively—to get a clear picture of what users think and why they do what they do—e.g., to “walk a mile in the user’s shoes” as a favorite UX maxim goes, it is essential that user experience designers and product teams conduct user research often and regularly. Contingent upon time, resources, and budget, the deeper they can dive the better.

What Is UX Research?

There is a long, comprehensive list of UX design research methods employed by user researchers , but at its center is the user and how they think and behave —their needs and motivations. Typically, UX research does this through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies.

There are two main types of user research: quantitative (statistics: can be calculated and computed; focuses on numbers and mathematical calculations) and qualitative (insights: concerned with descriptions, which can be observed but cannot be computed).

Quantitative research is primarily exploratory research and is used to quantify the problem by way of generating numerical data or data that can be transformed into usable statistics. Some common data collection methods include various forms of surveys – online surveys , paper surveys , mobile surveys and kiosk surveys , longitudinal studies, website interceptors, online polls, and systematic observations.

This user research method may also include analytics, such as Google Analytics .

Google Analytics is part of a suite of interconnected tools that help interpret data on your site’s visitors including Data Studio , a powerful data-visualization tool, and Google Optimize, for running and analyzing dynamic A/B testing.

Quantitative data from analytics platforms should ideally be balanced with qualitative insights gathered from other UX testing methods , such as focus groups or usability testing. The analytical data will show patterns that may be useful for deciding what assumptions to test further.

Qualitative user research is a direct assessment of behavior based on observation. It’s about understanding people’s beliefs and practices on their terms. It can involve several different methods including contextual observation, ethnographic studies, interviews, field studies, and moderated usability tests.

Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group feels that in the case of UX research, it is better to emphasize insights (qualitative research) and that although quant has some advantages, qualitative research breaks down complicated information so it’s easy to understand, and overall delivers better results more cost effectively—in other words, it is much cheaper to find and fix problems during the design phase before you start to build. Often the most important information is not quantifiable, and he goes on to suggest that “quantitative studies are often too narrow to be useful and are sometimes directly misleading.”

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. William Bruce Cameron

Design research is not typical of traditional science with ethnography being its closest equivalent—effective usability is contextual and depends on a broad understanding of human behavior if it is going to work.

Nevertheless, the types of user research you can or should perform will depend on the type of site, system or app you are developing, your timeline, and your environment.

Top UX Research Methods and When to Use Them

Here are some examples of the types of user research performed at each phase of a project.

Card Sorting : Allows users to group and sort a site’s information into a logical structure that will typically drive navigation and the site’s information architecture. This helps ensure that the site structure matches the way users think.

Contextual Interviews : Enables the observation of users in their natural environment, giving you a better understanding of the way users work.

First Click Testing : A testing method focused on navigation, which can be performed on a functioning website, a prototype, or a wireframe.

Focus Groups : Moderated discussion with a group of users, allowing insight into user attitudes, ideas, and desires.

Heuristic Evaluation/Expert Review : A group of usability experts evaluating a website against a list of established guidelines .

Interviews : One-on-one discussions with users show how a particular user works. They enable you to get detailed information about a user’s attitudes, desires, and experiences.

Parallel Design : A design methodology that involves several designers pursuing the same effort simultaneously but independently, with the intention to combine the best aspects of each for the ultimate solution.

Personas : The creation of a representative user based on available data and user interviews. Though the personal details of the persona may be fictional, the information used to create the user type is not.

Prototyping : Allows the design team to explore ideas before implementing them by creating a mock-up of the site. A prototype can range from a paper mock-up to interactive HTML pages.

Surveys : A series of questions asked to multiple users of your website that help you learn about the people who visit your site.

System Usability Scale (SUS) : SUS is a technology-independent ten-item scale for subjective evaluation of the usability.

Task Analysis : Involves learning about user goals, including what users want to do on your website, and helps you understand the tasks that users will perform on your site.

Usability Testing : Identifies user frustrations and problems with a site through one-on-one sessions where a “real-life” user performs tasks on the site being studied.

Use Cases : Provide a description of how users use a particular feature of your website. They provide a detailed look at how users interact with the site, including the steps users take to accomplish each task.

You can do user research at all stages or whatever stage you are in currently. However, the Nielsen Norman Group advises that most of it be done during the earlier phases when it will have the biggest impact. They also suggest it’s a good idea to save some of your budget for additional research that may become necessary (or helpful) later in the project.

Here is a diagram listing recommended options that can be done as a project moves through the design stages. The process will vary, and may only include a few things on the list during each phase. The most frequently used methods are shown in bold.

Reasons for Doing UX Research

Here are three great reasons for doing user research :

To create a product that is truly relevant to users

• If you don’t have a clear understanding of your users and their mental models, you have no way of knowing whether your design will be relevant. A design that is not relevant to its target audience will never be a success.

To create a product that is easy and pleasurable to use

• A favorite quote from Steve Jobs: “ If the user is having a problem, it’s our problem .” If your user experience is not optimal, chances are that people will move on to another product.

To have the return on investment (ROI) of user experience design validated and be able to show:

• An improvement in performance and credibility
• Increased exposure and sales—growth in customer base
• A reduced burden on resources—more efficient work processes

Aside from the reasons mentioned above, doing user research gives insight into which features to prioritize, and in general, helps develop clarity around a project.

What Results Can I Expect from UX Research?

In the words of Mike Kuniaysky, user research is “ the process of understanding the impact of design on an audience. ”

User research has been essential to the success of behemoths like USAA and Amazon ; Joe Gebbia, CEO of Airbnb is an enthusiastic proponent, testifying that its implementation helped turn things around for the company when it was floundering as an early startup.

Some of the results generated through UX research confirm that improving the usability of a site or app will:

• Increase conversion rates
• Increase sign-ups
• Increase NPS (net promoter score)
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Increase purchase rates
• Boost loyalty to the brand
• Reduce customer service calls

Additionally, and aside from benefiting the overall user experience, the integration of UX research into the development process can:

• Minimize development time
• Reduce production costs
• Uncover valuable insights about your audience
• Give an in-depth view into users’ mental models, pain points, and goals

User research is at the core of every exceptional user experience. As the name suggests, UX is subjective—the experience that a person goes through while using a product. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the needs and goals of potential users, the context, and their tasks which are unique for each product. By selecting appropriate UX research methods and applying them rigorously, designers can shape a product’s design and can come up with products that serve both customers and businesses more effectively.

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

• How to Conduct Effective UX Research: A Guide
• The Value of User Research
• UX Research Methods and the Path to User Empathy
• Design Talks: Research in Action with UX Researcher Caitria O'Neill
• Swipe Right: 3 Ways to Boost Safety in Dating App Design
• How to Avoid 5 Types of Cognitive Bias in User Research

Understanding the basics

How do you do user research in ux.

UX research includes two main types: quantitative (statistical data) and qualitative (insights that can be observed but not computed), done through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies. The UX research methods used depend on the type of site, system, or app being developed.

What are UX methods?

There is a long list of methods employed by user research, but at its center is the user and how they think, behave—their needs and motivations. Typically, UX research does this through observation techniques, task analysis, and other UX methodologies.

What is the best research methodology for user experience design?

The type of UX methodology depends on the type of site, system or app being developed, its timeline, and environment. There are 2 main types: quantitative (statistics) and qualitative (insights).

What does a UX researcher do?

A user researcher removes the need for false assumptions and guesswork by using observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies to understand a user’s motivation, behavior, and needs.

Why is UX research important?

UX research will help create a product that is relevant to users and is easy and pleasurable to use while boosting a product’s ROI. Aside from these reasons, user research gives insight into which features to prioritize, and in general, helps develop clarity around a project.

• UserResearch

Miklos Philips

London, United Kingdom

Member since May 20, 2016

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A Guide to Task-Based UX Metrics

While it’s not always feasible to assess a task experience (because of challenges with budgets, timelines, or access to products and users), observing participants attempt tasks can help uncover usability problems, informing designers about what needs to be improved.

One defining characteristic of a usability test is the use of tasks. Tasks involve a representative user attempting to accomplish a realistic goal, such as finding a movie to stream, selecting a product to purchase, or reserving a hotel room.

Tasks can be used to help uncover usability problems , suggesting what needs to be improved in an interface. But the result of the task itself can become a good metric to track. If users can’t reach common goals in an interface, then not much else matters.

To measure the user experience, you ideally quantify both attitudes and actions. When conducting a task-based evaluation, your task metrics should include a mix of what people do (behavioral or “action” metrics) and what people think (attitude metrics). You might also include one or more behavioral/physiological or combined metrics.

In this article, we provide a guide to task-based UX metrics.

1. Action Metrics

The essential task-based action metrics are operationalized from the ISO definition of usability : a combination of effectiveness (action), efficiency (action), and satisfaction (attitude).

These metrics can be collected from simulated tasks (e.g., a usability test) or actual observation of goal-based task performance.

Completion Rate : Assessing the success of a task based on predefined success criteria is the fundamental task-based behavioral metric (for example, the percentage of participants finding the correct product from a list of products on a website). We recommend coding completion rates as 1 for success and 0 for failure (a binary or binomial metric). Report the percentage complete (from 0 to 100%) along with an adjusted Wald confidence interval .

Findability Rate : The findability rate is a special type of completion rate typically used in a tree test or first-click test where the primary goal of the evaluation is to understand if participants can locate a function, product, or piece of information. It is coded and analyzed in the same way as a task completion rate.

Time on Task : The quintessential measure of efficiency is recording how long it takes a participant to attempt a task, typically measured in minutes and seconds, but it could be in hours, days, or milliseconds. There are at least three common ways to report task time:

• Time to complete: Time of participants who meet the success criteria.
• Time on task: Time of all participants.
• Time till failure: Time of participants who fail to meet the success criteria.

Because of the positive skew of task time data (you can’t have less than 0 seconds but there’s no theoretical upper limit), we recommend reporting either the geometric mean or the median , depending on the sample size.

Clicks/Pageviews : A less-used measure of efficiency is the number of clicks or unique pages a participant uses to attempt a task. Both tend to have a strong correlation with task time but clicks, in particular, require some defining (repeatedly clicking scroll bars vs. clicking in-page elements). Both can be used as a crude form of engagement or exploration, and unique pageviews are also used in a lostness metric (see below).

Errors : Errors included slips (accidents) and mistakes (incorrect intention but non-accidental behavior). Coding errors can be time-consuming and somewhat subjective, as an evaluator will need to observe the actions of users.

2. Attitudinal Metrics

Attitudinal metrics are essentially questionnaires (usually short) that can be collected at both the task level and study level.

Ease (SEQ ® ): The Single Ease Question (SEQ) is a single seven-point bipolar item ranging from very difficult to very easy. The SEQ is able to discriminate as well as or better than other multi-item measures [ PDF ]. It has a normalized database that converts raw scores to percentile ranks (e.g., 5.5 is an average score, the 50 th percentile of perceived task ease).

Confidence : Users should be able to complete tasks and be confident they did so correctly. Confidence can be measured using a seven-point scale (1 = not at all confident to 7 = very confident). Confidence usually correlates highly with ease, but it can provide additional information such as when users think a task is difficult but are confident they completed it, or when they completed a task successfully but were not confident. See below for combining confidence with completion rates.

Task Load (NASA-TLX) : Related to ease, the Task-Load Index developed at NASA is a more extensive version of the SEQ (but highly correlated with it) that contains six items typically used when there’s a hardware component (e.g., in cockpits).

Mental Effort (SMEQ ): The Subjective Mental Effort Questionnaire is a less-used single-item measure of perceived task ease. Participants mark their level of mental effort with labels calibrated on an interval-scaled continuum from 0 to 150 (e.g., 0: Not at all hard to do; 70: Pretty hard to do; 115: Tremendously hard to do). Its original paper version had participants marked a position on a line; today’s digital versions have participants use a slider .

After Scenario Questionnaire (ASQ) : This three-item questionnaire assesses perceptions of ease, time taken, and documentation on the task.

Expectation : Asking participants how difficult they think a task will be , typically using an ease scale such as the SEQ.

Usability Magnitude Estimation (UME) : Participants rate a calibrated standard task using their own number (e.g., 10) and then rate subsequent tasks as a ratio to the standard task. A task rated as 20 would be twice as hard and a task rated 5 half as hard as the standard task. Researchers have reported that participants often have some difficulty providing these types of ratings [ PDF ].

Variations of Perceptions of the Task Experience : There are countless ways to have a participant reflect upon a task experience using single or multiple items. Common ones include overall satisfaction with the task, task complexity, quality of search results, other difficulty/ease ratings, and comprehension.

Similarity/Differences from Card Sorting : Card sorting is a unique UX method that involves data from a participant that’s different than typical attitudinal data collected on rating scales after attempting to complete a task. The participant behavior is to assign cards (physical or virtual) to groups, from which it is possible to derive similarity metrics among the cards. Researchers can analyze the data to gain insight into mental models, which can guide the design of user interfaces and information architectures.

3. Behavioral and Physiological Metrics

Less commonly used metrics that can be associated with tasks include the use of eye-tracking, coding facial expressions, and physiology measures.

Eye-Tracking Metrics : In eye-tracking , you define areas of interest (AOIs) such as a label in a menu, an advertisement, or any other image. With an AOI you can collect metrics including:

Dwell time: The time spent within the AOI.

Fixation count: Average number of eye fixations within an AOI.

Time till first fixation: How long it takes from the start of a task till a participant fixates within an AOI.

Pupil dilation: While less used in performance-based studies, pupil dilation and its change over time can be used as an indication of interest/attentiveness.

Facial Expression Coding: Users’ facial expressions are videotaped and coded independently by evaluators to assess the frequency of eyebrow raising, eye widening, mouth opening, or other rubrics often to identify an emotional reaction to an experience.

Various Physiology Measures

Electrodermal activity: Also known as skin conductance or Galvanic skin response (GSR), this is a way of measuring emotional arousal (one of the measures used in a polygraph lie detector, driven by arousal effects on sweat gland activity).

Electromyogram (EMG):  Muscle movements are measured using an electromyogram. This is most common in device testing, but EMGs are another way to quantify changes in facial expressions.

Heart rate: Heart rate variability can be used as a measure of stress in response to a stimulus.

Electroencephalogram (EEG): Brain wave patterns recorded with EEG can be analyzed to detect changes in arousal and emotion .

Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS): Related to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but more portable, fNIRS has the potential for distinguishing positive and negative emotional reactions .

Tapping : Having participants tap at a steady rate using their feet or finger while also attempting a task has been used as a measure of cognitive load (loss of tapping rhythm may indicate a more demanding task).

4. Combined Metrics

Attitudinal and action metrics can be combined to form other task-based metrics.

Single Usability Metric (SUM) : SUM is the average of standardized versions of completion rates, task times, task-level satisfaction, and errors, weighted equally.

Learnability : Multiple measures (e.g., time, SEQ, completion) can be used at different points longitudinally as a measure of how learnable an interface is.

Change from Expectation : Comparing the same attitudinal measure (e.g., the SEQ) collected after reading the task description but before actually working on the task with the rating provided after experiencing the task. A drop suggests a poorer-than-expected experience and an increase suggests a better-than-expected experience.

Disaster : A “ disaster ” (the term was coined by Gerry McGovern) occurs when a participant fails a task but is extremely confident it was completed successfully.

Lostness : A measure of how “lost” a participant is when looking for information. The lostness metric is calculated from (1) the number of unique page views relative to the minimum number of pages and (2) the total number of pages relative to the unique number of pages.

Efficiency Ratio : The efficiency ratio can be measured at the task or participant level. For a task, it’s the percentage of successful task completions divided by the mean completion time. For a participant, it’s the number of completed tasks divided by the total time spent working on tasks.

Summary and Discussion

In current practice, the essential task-based UX metrics are those associated with actions and attitudes. Less commonly used are behavioral/physiological and combined metrics.

1. Action metrics : Fundamental action metrics are completion rates (can people successfully do what they want or are asked to do, a measure of effectiveness) and task times (a measure of efficiency). Findability rates, clicks/pageviews, and errors are additional action metrics.

2. Attitudinal metrics : The fundamental attitudinal metric for tasks is perceived ease, commonly measured with the Single Ease Question. Other attitudinal metrics include ratings of confidence, task load, mental effort, expectation, and use of Usability Magnitude Estimation. Although not exactly the same, data from card sorting tasks can reveal mental models (cognitive and/or attitudinal) that potentially inform UI and IA design.

3. Behavioral and physiological metrics : Of these metrics, probably the most common are those derived from eye-tracking (e.g., dwell time, fixation count, time till first fixation, pupil dilation). Other behavioral/physiological metrics that have been used in UX research and practice include facial expression coding, electrodermal activity, EMG, heart rate, EEG, fNIRS, and tapping.

4. Combined metrics : The most commonly used combined metrics are the Single Usability Metric and learnability. This class of metrics also includes change from expectation, disaster, lostness, and efficiency ratio.

You might also be interested in

What is the purpose of task analysis?

IMAGE SOURCE

One of the purposes of doing a task analysis is to provide actionable insights into user processes. This can be directly applied in designing efficient user flows that help avoid unnecessary work from the users. Instead, it delegates the tasks to the system.

Hierarchical task analysis encompasses a range of techniques from observations of the users to document their performance.

In the User and Task Analysis for Interface Design, a book written by JoAnn Hackos and Janice Redish , provided the following important questions when it comes to conducting a task analysis:

What are your users’ goals?

What are they trying to achieve?

What do users actually do to achieve these goals?

What experiences (personal, social, and cultural) do users bring to the tasks?

How are users influenced by their physical environment?

How do users’ previous knowledge and experience influence the tasks at hand?

How do they think about their work?

What is the workflow they follow to perform the tasks?

What are the different approaches to user task analysis that can be useful in UX/UI design?

There are three approaches that you can do when it comes to conducting a user task analysis in UX and UI design. These are:

Contextual (User-centered model)

Contextual analysis is about obtaining a user-centered model of the task at hand or as it is currently performed in the user’s actual environment.

This enables UX designers to understand how the product is fit to the user-- the environment, needs, and other tools uses.

Let us take the example of designing for users in a chaotic environment. In this case, you will need to take these interruptions into account, including safeguards against unintentional errors, and providing options to choose the task up again after some delay (Mayhew, 2007).

The contextual task analysis is an indispensable approach when it comes to pinpointing novel business opportunities.  It answers the following questions:

What design technology solutions help the user do their task efficiently?

Is the product design seamlessly integrated into the user’s existing processes? How is easy or hard for new users to pick up and adjust to this design?

Lastly, understanding how users already interact with existing tools helps UX and UI designers create an interface that is already familiar to the users. 

Cognitive (Deeper mental process)

Cognitive task analysis is focused on understanding tasks with deeper mental processes. Examples of cognitive task analysis tasks are decision-making, attention, memory, and judgment. 

Hierarchical (User-behavior study)

Hierarchical task analysis is a study of user behavior, breaking the high-level tasks into smaller subtasks.

The information is created in a visualized form or diagram that describes the steps to be taken to achieve the defined goal.

When to Perform a Task Analysis

We recommend that you conduct the task analysis early in the design process, particularly before you begin the design work.

This is important since task analysis supports several aspects of the user-centered design process, such as the following:

Gathering of website requirements

Developing content strategy and site structure

Wireframing and Prototyping

Performing usability tests

Preparing to conduct a task analysis process

Based on the Usability professionals Courage by Redish and Wixon, the task analysis is an activity based on four core principles:

1.   An integral part of a wider analysis, which includes understanding the user and the environment

2.   It includes understanding users’ goals

3.   Although the focus, methods, granularity, and presentation of information may differ at different times, task analysis is relevant at all stages of the design and development process

4.   The practical reality is that task analysis for a given project depends on many factors.

If you break down the above principles, you will notice that the first two provide a deep understanding of the users, their environments, and their goals.

It is natural to expect that task analysis is a process that must be informed by the outputs of the previous stages such as empathizing with your users.

In this step, you should have already conducted user interviews and collected data through observation to better understand the users and build empathy with them. In short, expect that you will have engaged in some UX research that results in several outputs. These outputs could be user personas, scenarios, and storyboards. All of these pieces of information are essential for task analysis, as you will base your work according to these outputs.

But of course, collecting data is not enough for any user research. If you want to conduct a task analysis, you must have a well-made and focused data collection.

UX consultant Larry Marine recommends that any user research should focus on collecting the following five types of data during the task analysis phase. These are:

Trigger 

The thing that prompts users to start the task

Desired Outcome

When users will know the task is complete

Base Knowledge

What users expect to know when starting the task

Required Knowledge

What users actually need to know in order to complete the task

The tools or information that users utilize during the course of the task

Steps in task analysis

After you have gathered all the important data and insights during the empathy phase, you can now start to sketch out how a user goes on with their daily life through mapping the sequence of activities required to achieve a goal.

Before you begin, it’s important to have an overview of the process or method and its steps, so you can better prepare.

The process of task analysis can be broken down into the following steps/tasks:

Identify the task for analysis

You can begin by picking a persona and a scenario for user research. Then repeat the task analysis process for each one. Do not forget to answer this question: What are that user’s goal and motivation for trying to achieve it?

Break the high-level tasks into subtasks

Prepare at least 4 to 8 subtasks after this process. If you have more, then it means that your identified goal is too high-level or too abstract, which can be a challenge.

Thus, try breaking high-level subtasks down into smaller subtasks to achieve your goal. Each subtask should be specified by its objectives flow. These objectives should cover the whole area of interest when placed together.

Draw a layered task diagram

You need to draw a layered task diagram of each subtask and ensure it is complete.

Since there is no standard for the diagram, you can use any notation you like.

Try to write a story when a diagram is not enough. Many of the nuances, motivations, and reasons behind each action are simply lost in the diagrams. All these simply because they depict more about the actions and not the reasons behind them. When writing a story, make sure you accompany your diagrams with a full narrative that focuses the diagram on the whys.

Validation of analysis

Once you are completed and are happy with your work, we recommend that you review the analysis with a person who was not involved in the decomposition but knows the task flow well enough to check for consistency.

This person can be someone from another team working on the same project. You could also enlist the help of actual users and stakeholders for this purpose.

Bonus step: Conduct a parallel task analysis

A trick you might want to consider is utilizing parallel task analysis or getting more than one person on the UX design team to undertake the system process simultaneously.

This way, you can later compare your outputs and merge them into one final deliverable. This is very helpful if you are working internationally, or where multiple personas have to be considered for the same goal.

An example of a task analysis

To make it easier for you to understand the system process involved in task analysis below is a quick walk-through of a simple UX task analysis example.

In this example, we will analyze a user who loves to shop online and wants to buy a new pair of shoes for summer.

What is the goal?

Purchase a pair of shoes in an online app store

What are the tasks involved to achieve the goal?

Subtask 1: find the shoes on the mobile app.

Open the app

Go to the shoe section

Find the shoes on the category page

Subtask 2: Add the shoes to the shopping cart

Click on the product detail page

Choose the size

Click “add to cart”

Subtask 3: Proceed to checkout

Go to the “shopping cart” page

Click “checkout”

Register/log in or choose guest checkout option

Subtasks 4: Checkout

Enter delivery info

Choose the payment method

Enter billing info and card number

Review the purchase and pay

The takeaway

Learning the value of conducting a task analysis will help us achieve a better user experience for our users on how they interact with the product design.

In this article, we have learned how task analysis is able to help us design a better human-centric product to help users achieve the intended goal not only in an easy and hassle-free experience, but a good overall experience with the interface of the website, product, system, or app that we have designed for them.

Among many other things, conducting a task analysis during the first stages (and even before the design phase) of UX research will help UX and UI designers better understand or analyze their users. As a result: a better product design output.

Remember that the entire objective of doing task analysis is to improve the user experience. Conducting a task Analysis certainly is beneficial for understanding the steps and tasks involved in completing tasks, including all the pain points for the user.

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Mary Ann Dalangin

About the author

A content marketing strategist and a UX writer with years of experience in the digital marketing industry.

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Turn user goals into task scenarios for usability testing.

January 12, 2014 2014-01-12

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The most effective way of understanding what works and what doesn’t in an interface is to watch people use it . This is the essence of usability testing . When the right participants attempt realistic activities, you gain qualitative insights into what is causing users to have trouble . These insights help you determine how to improve the design.

Also, you can measure the percentage of tasks that users complete correctly as a way to communicate a site’s overall usability.

In This Article:

What users need to be able to do, engage users with task scenarios.

In order to observe participants you need to give them something to do. These assignments are frequently referred to as tasks . (During testing I like to call them “ activities ” to avoid making the participants feel like they’re being tested).

Rather than simply ordering test users to "do X" with no explanation, it's better to situate the request within a short scenario that sets the stage for the action and provides a bit of explanation and context for why the user is "doing X."

Before you can write the task scenarios used in testing, you have to come up with a list of general user goals that visitors to your site (or application) may have. Ask yourself: What are the most important things that every user must be able to accomplish on the site?

For example, nngroup.com users must be able to accomplish 3 main goals:

• Find articles on a specific topic
• Sign up for UX Week seminars
• Learn about our consulting services

Once you’ve figured out what the users' goals are, you need to formulate task scenarios that are appropriate for usability testing. A task scenario is the action that you ask the participant to take on the tested interface. For example, a task scenario could be:

You're planning a vacation to New York City, March 3 − March 14. You need to buy both airfare and hotel. Go to the American Airlines site and jetBlue Airlines site and see who has the best deals.

Task scenarios need to provide context so users engage with the interface and pretend to perform business or personal tasks as if they were at home or in the office.

Poorly written tasks often focus too much on forcing users to interact with a specific feature, rather than seeing if and how the user chooses to use the interface. A scenario puts the task into context and, thus, ideally motivates the participant.

The following 3 task-writing tips will improve the outcome of your usability studies.

1. Make the Task Realistic

User goal: Browse product offerings and purchase an item. Poor task: Purchase a pair of orange Nike running shoes. Better task: Buy a pair of shoes for less than $40.

Asking a participant to do something that he wouldn’t normally do will make him try to complete the task without really engaging with the interface. Poorly written tasks make it more difficult for participants to suspend disbelief about actually owning the task. In the example, the participant should have the freedom to compare products based on his own criteria.

Coming up with realistic tasks will depend on the participants that you recruit and on the features that you test. For example, if you test a hotel website, you need to make sure that the participants would be the ones in their family responsible for travel research and reservations.

Alternatively, you can decide to let the participants define their own tasks. For example, you could recruit users who are in the process of buying a car and let them continue their research during the session, instead of giving them a task scenario. ( Field studies are ideal for observing users in their own environment as they perform their own tasks, but field studies are more expensive and time consuming.)

2. Make the Task Actionable

User goal: Find movie and show times. Poor task: You want to see a movie Sunday afternoon. Go to www.fandango.com and tell me where you’d click next. Better task: Use www.fandago.com to find a movie you’d be interested in seeing on Sunday afternoon.

It’s best to ask the users to do the action , rather than asking them how they would do it. If you ask “How would you find a way to do X?” or “Tell me how you would do Y” the participant is likely to answer in words, not actions. And unfortunately, people’s self-reported data is not as accurate as when they actually use a system. Additionally, having them talk through what they would do doesn’t allow you to observe the ease or frustration that comes with using the interface.

You can tell that the task isn’t actionable enough if the participant turns to the facilitator, takes her hand off the mouse, and says something like “I would first click here, and then there would be a link to where I want to go, and I’d click on that.”

3. Avoid Giving Clues and Describing the Steps

User goal: Look up grades. Poor task: You want to see the results of your midterm exams. Go to the website, sign in, and tell me where you would click to get your transcript. Better task: Look up the results of your midterm exams.

Step descriptions often contain hidden clues as to how to use the interface. For example, if you tell someone to click on Benefits in the main menu, you won’t learn if that menu label is meaningful to her. These tasks bias users’ behavior and give you less useful results.

Task scenarios that include terms used in the interface also bias the users. If you’re interested in learning if people can sign up for the newsletter and your site has a large button labeled Sign up for newsletter , you should not phrase the task as " Sign up for this company's weekly newsletter. " It's better to use a task such as: “ Find a way to get information on upcoming events sent to your email on a regular basis .” 

Avoiding words used in the interface is not always easy or natural and can even be confusing to users, especially if you try to derive roundabout ways to describe something that already has a standard, well-known name. In that case, you may want to use the established term. Avoiding clues does not mean being vague. For example, compare the following 2 tasks:

Poor task: Make an appointment with your dentist. Better task: Make an appointment for next Tuesday at 10am with your dentist, Dr. Petersen.

You might think that this second task violates the guideline for tasks to be realistic if the user's dentist isn't really Dr. Petersen. However, this is one of those cases in which users are very good at suspending disbelief and proceeding to make the appointment just as they would with a differently-named dentist. You might need to have the user pretend to be seeing Dr. Petersen if you're testing a paper prototype or other early prototype design that includes only a few dentists.

If the task scenario is too vague, the participant will likely ask you for more information or will want to confirm that she is on the right path. Provide the participant with all the information that she needs to complete a task, without telling her where to click. During a usability test, mimic the real world as much as possible. Recruit representative users and ensure that each task scenario:

• is realistic and typical for how people actually use the system when they are on their own time, doing their own activities
• encourages users to interact with the interface
• doesn’t give away the answer.

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