Your website's top tasks - McGovern

Gerry McGovern has been writing for a long time about how every site's visitors have a small number of tasks they want to complete above everything else. Here he explains his technique. It's something that's worked for me on a number of occasions. Well worth considering.

Gerry says:

Whenever you get people to vote on a list of tasks, clear trends will quickly emerge... Typically, in surveying 100 tasks, the top 5 tasks will get an average of 25% of the vote, with the bottom 50 tasks also getting 25%. In other words, the top 5 tasks get as much of the vote as the bottom 50.

If you've not come across this before, I recommend you investigate further. I've found that conducting a survey like Gerry's can be a great compliment to analysis of your webstats.

Top tasks identification method explained - article by Gerry McGovern

Long version: Web surveys are broken: how to fix them (PDF: 2 MB)