What Are User Tasks and How to Analyze Them for Successful Product UX?
For any SaaS owner or product manager, understanding your customers’ daily lives and the user tasks they need to complete to achieve their goals is vital.
In this article, we’re going to unpack a repeatable framework for you to analyze user tasks to create successful user experiences.
What are user tasks?
User tasks are the clearly defined steps a user needs to complete in order to solve their problems and tackle their jobs to be done (JTBD) when using your product or service.
Here are a few examples to give you context – you can easily imagine these as part of many SaaS workflows:
- Adding team members for collaboration
- Generating performance reports
- Integrating third-party tools
What is user task analysis?
User task analysis describes the process of observing users, recording the specific actions they take within your product, and analyzing how they achieve their goals.
The primary reason why companies perform task analysis is to build a better understanding of their users’ real needs. This enables you to improve your product’s UX by eliminating friction points in the process and reducing users’ mental workload.
What is the difference between user goals and user tasks?
There’s a subtle distinction here, and it’s important to understand the difference.
- User goals. These describe the overarching aims a customer has when using your product or service. They’ll often be part of a wider business strategy.
- User tasks. These are the specific actions and activities a user needs to perform in order to achieve their goals.
Let’s consider an example: a goal might be for a user to create a personalized onboarding experience, and a task might be to implement a welcome survey to collect user data.
Why is it important to define and analyze user tasks?
The better you understand the tasks your users are undertaking, the more effectively you’ll be able to meet their needs.
There are a number of reasons why analyzing key usability tasks are important:
- Customer knowledge. By analyzing user behavior with usability testing, you’ll build a richer understanding of their needs, pain points, and objectives.
- Reduce bias. As a product design team, you may have a vastly different experience from your user base. Task analysis will ensure there is no bias and help you create a user flow that truly meets their needs.
- Identify friction points. You can quickly find out which stage in the journey users run into issues and quickly remove them to create a frictionless experience.
When should product teams conduct user task analysis?
There are two key points in the product design process when teams should consider getting involved in task analysis (perhaps in the form of a usability test).
- Building a new feature/product. When undertaking a new project, or adding a new feature, task analysis can help you understand how they slot into an existing user experience.
- Feature updates. Task analysis isn’t just for new features. It’ll help you work out how best to iterate and update your existing features as well. Mobile slideouts are a powerful way to engage customers with contextual information without disrupting their experience.
How to analyze user tasks for creating a successful product UX?
Well, how do you actually go about doing this task analysis with actual users and helping them reach their desired outcomes?
Here are some instructions to help you get started.
Decide on the main task to be analyzed
Begin with the end in mind. Start by picking the high-level task that you want to understand more about. The narrower your definition of a task, the better.
For example, if you’re an email automation SaaS company, rather than looking at the whole process, you might want to specifically scrutinize how users automate the first email sequence.
Divide the main task into subtasks
Next, break down that main task into distinct, actionable steps or subtasks. As a rule of thumb, each primary task should easily be split into 4-8 subtasks.
Segment the users whose actions you want to analyze
There’s no point in conducting a global analysis, aka your entire customer base. You are better off identifying and analyzing the correct user segment. By isolating your research to a relevant user group, you’re more likely to get accurate data that helps you make effective product decisions.
Many tools won’t have the powerful segmentation capabilities necessary to dive deep into distinct user groups. Userpilot helps you segment users by a huge range of characteristics and enables you to target their experiences accordingly.
Observe how a user performs the tasks
The next step is to watch and learn.
You can observe users perform these tasks by monitoring product usage data or conducting interviews. Customer interviews are a time-consuming process but give valuable insights. Monitoring product data, on the other hand, lets you analyze user actions on a continuous basis.
Userpilot’s feature tagging functionality lets you tag important stages in the product journey to track engagement over time.
Create custom goals and track users’ progress toward achieving them
This is a crucial step because it’s where your task analysis becomes practical. Without a goal, you can’t score – so make sure you define the milestones a user needs to hit in the pursuit of achieving the primary task. Digitizing the steps saves a huge amount of time.
Create a layered task diagram based on the data collected
Now it’s time to take the data gathered during the observation phase and build a visual with references to key tasks and how they fit together.
A layered task diagram is a perfect solution: it captures the task flow from beginning to end, showing how subtasks map to tasks and the different routes a user can take.
Validate and analyze results
Next, you need to validate your user research. You can do this in two ways.
- Share your findings with teammates who are familiar with the main task but weren’t a part of the task analysis.
- Discuss with teammates who did the same task analysis but independently of you.
This will make sure you don’t miss key details and ensure consistency in your approach.
Remove friction points and create a happy path
The final step is to take what you’ve learned and apply it to your in-app flows to improve the experience.
Your research should show you exactly where the friction points in the process are. Removing them will enable you to map out a ‘happy path‘ that sets out the ideal path to value for your customers.
Best practices for defining good user tasks
Of course, task analysis is going to differ between product teams. Despite that, there are some common best practices that’ll help keep you on the right track:
Define tasks clearly. You should ensure your task description is crystal clear and importantly, actionable. Use action verbs to guide users (i.e., enter this, navigate here, filter by this term).
Reflect user journeys accurately. Don’t skip important steps, and make sure the subtasks follow an appropriate user flow. You want to make it as simple as possible for users to follow the flow.
Keep it brief. If a process has anything more than 8 subtasks, it’s far too complex. The lengthier the task, the higher the risk of drop-out rates.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you should now have a solid understanding of what user tasks are, how you can analyze them, and what are the best practices that’ll keep you on the right track.
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