Method for Identifying Core Tasks

This section describes a stepwise approach to identifying both the current and future potential core tasks of your product. In overview, the steps are as follows:

Step 1: Identify or Define Your Target Users

Step 2: Identify the User Needs of the Target Users

Step 3: Identify the Core Tasks of Your Product

Step 4: Identify Potential Future Core Tasks

Step 5: Document Your Preliminary Core Tasks

Step 6: Verify and Prioritize Your Core Tasks

Step 7: Identify the Top Core Tasks for Your Product

Step 8: Process and Document the Results

Step 1: Identify or Define Your Target Users

Since core tasks will change with user needs, which again will change with the target users you are approaching, identifying—or defining—your target users is the first essential step. Throughout this chapter, I will as an example use a music-playing device targeted for teenagers in developed markets (see Figure 5-3).

Figure 5-3. Target users in the example: teenagers in developed markets

Step 2: Identify the User Needs of the Target Users

You can use the methods described in the previous chapter to identify the user needs for the target users. For the music player example, we will assume that you have already identified the user needs of the teenagers in developed markets. Figure 5-4 shows a list of the user needs for teenagers in developed markets. The list is deliberately made incomplete to keep the example simple.

As the figure indicates, you do not want to limit the user needs to those specifically relevant to your current product or assumed product, and you certainly want to list needs that the users currently use other products or means to achieve. Several of these latent user needs can perhaps be achieved with the product you are designing, and you will hence have a unique chance to create the first product of its kind that solves these needs. You will in other words get almost direct inputs to ideas about where you can improve your product in the future and where you can add successful user experience innovation.

Figure 5-4. Example of user needs for teenagers in developed markets

Step 3: Identify the Core Tasks of Your Product

If you already have a similar product on the market for similar target users, you may be tempted to identify your current core tasks by asking your existing users what tasks they already perform. You could hold a meeting, such as in Figure 5-4.

If your product is a web page or a software application, you can run statistics on which tasks the users are performing with your product. These can give you information about which tasks are currently core for the current users.

Figure 5-5. Identifying core tasks

However, since core tasks are defined as tasks that the user expects to use your product for, your interviews and statistics will be skewed by how well you have designed the features or applications for your core tasks. If you have, for example, designed your calendar application for your web page very poorly or hidden it under some difficult-to-understand drop-down menu, your feedback and data may not highlight tasks such as creating appointments as core. Also, statistical data will also reveal tasks that you have not implemented yet.

Also, which is often the case, you may be targeting a different group of users with your new product. Hence your statistics and user interviews will be obsolete.

In some cases you may also look at your pain points. Pain points can, for example, be identified by going through e-mails or call logs from your customer service. Not only are pain points great tools for innovating user experience improvements (as described in Chapter 9), but they may also reveal the tasks that users are performing (or expecting to perform) a lot in your product.

While statistical data and pain points may sometimes be useful to identify existing core tasks, you will always want to back up your core task identification with the approach described following. Certain market research agencies will also be able to provide you with an approach similar to the one I describe. My approach, however, may be lower key and hence maybe easier to take.

Gathering a Group of Cross-Functional Team Members and Lead Users

The first thing you want to do is to invite cross-functional team members for a short innovation session. You want to invite team members from different parts of the company, especially those who specialize in user experience design and consumer insights. Who to invite from your company depends on the size and structure of your organization, as well as the type of product you are designing.

You should also ideally invite real users. Discovering core tasks by analyzing user needs will surely require interviewing actual users.

Process for Identifying Core Tasks for Your Product

My suggestion for this approach is to use a simple drawing (e.g., on a white board) where you place a photo of a representative target user—or multiple photos of target users—in the center, and then place the user needs around the user, basically as suggested already in Figure 5-5 for the music player example. You can use this drawing with the team of people you have gathered and start imagining which user tasks may be core tasks for yourproduct.

Identifying core tasks for elements that you already have solutions for in your existing products is usually quite straightforward, since you know your products and can easily relate to these tasks. But a core purpose of this workshop is to also identify core tasks that are currently not covered by your product. These are the so-called future potential core tasks.

Again, you want to keep the type of product you are designing in mind, but do not be too restrictive. You need to try to imagine what kind of tasks the type of product you are designing may likely be used for in the future. It is essential to be innovative in this process; it's fine to come up with wild ideas for core tasks, since you will need to verify your core tasks with the target users later anyway.

You may also look at related products to get inspiration. If you are designing a music player, you might, for example, look at what is happening in the market for other handheld devices, such as mobile phones, navigation devices, portable game devices, and so on.

The result of the workshop could, for example, be as displayed as in Figure 5-6, which shows the results for the music player example.

Figure 5-6. Example of results from finding core tasks from user needs

Step 4: Identify Potential Future Core Tasks

You may have market research or other insights indicating a rising interest for solutions that your product is already offering, or that your product could offer in future. These tasks are hence not core tasks yet, but they may well become core tasks in the future.

Identifying potential future core tasks is extremely important, since there are many possibilities for successful user experience innovation if your product can provide solutions for these latent user needs before your competition will do it. For finding potential future core tasks, you need to identify latent or already existing user needs among your target users.

If you are designer of a company website, you will try to find out what information and applications are missing on your website. You want to look for ideas from customer feedback. You will check what competing companies offer on their websites. And you will want to interview customers about what they are missing and about their latent needs.

If you are designing a device, you will look at competitor devices to see if they offer solutions for core tasks that you have sparsely covered.

You may also want to look at devices or systems not directly competing with your device, but where you can find inspiration. If you design mobile phones, for example, it will be obvious to look at what core tasks are solved in the PC or tablet world. These core tasks may evolve into core tasks for mobile devices later.

If you are designing a word processor or some other piece of software, you will look for competition and try to dig out relevant core tasks from them. Or you will invite or ask lead users (as described in Chapter 13). But the key goal is to find unsolved target user needs and hence potential core tasks that apply to your product.

In the example with the music player for teenagers, you may have found potential future core tasks already from the exercise described previously. Maybe you deducted some core tasks from latent end-user needs—for example, the task of playing games with friends on your device or sending text messages.

By looking at potential future core tasks you will have a unique opportunity to provide great user experience innovations. If you design your solutions very well, your company may even end up later being seen as the inventor of the specific solutions.

Potential future core tasks, however, have some inherent challenges also. Try to avoid focusing on solutions for these potential core tasks so much that you end up reducing the user experience of the already existing core tasks.

Step 5: Document Your Preliminary Core Tasks

You can now document the imagined and hence assumed core tasks that you have identified for the product you are designing. One way is to place each of the user needs in the center of a page and show the identified core tasks around it. Figure 5-7 shows this approach for a single user need from the music player example: “I love to hang out with my friends.”

Figure 5-7. Method to show core tasks for a specific user need (music player example)

Step 6: Verify and Prioritize Your Core Tasks

Verifying your core tasks with target users is essential. Maybe you have misunderstood a user need. If the target users for the mobile phone you are designing have a need to protect their family, it may likely be a mistake to assume that you should build a full-blown camera surveillance system into your device. Maybe your users would never want to use your specific product to solve that need.

As another example, if you have a spreadsheet product, your product's users will likely also have needs to write documents. This does not, however, mean that you should integrate a word processor into your spreadsheet program, since the users may already have adequate means to solve this task.

Maybe you have overlooked an important user need, and this may also be revealed when verifying and prioritizing your core tasks with the users.

When verifying your core tasks, it is essential that you have the target users' prioritize the core tasks. And it is important that the target users have your type of product in mind for the prioritization. In this way, you will filter out core tasks that are relevant for the user, but for which there are sufficient solutions in other products (or that users would never see themselves performing on your type of device). For example, if you are designing a car key, and you have identified that writing text messages is a core task for your target users, you would hardly want to add that functionality to your key.

You can verify the core tasks by interviewing a number of target users face to face, or via phone or e-mail. You may also invite multiple target users into your office and let them prioritize in a team.

Make use of simple but effective methods to help users keep track of the big picture. For example, you can print each of your core tasks on separate pieces of paper and let the user arrange them in priority order, or place them in different categories, such as Very Important, Important, Less Important, and so on. Be sure to allow the users to discard core tasks and add new ones as well.

For the music player example, the result of the prioritization could be like that shown in Figure 5-8.

Figure 5-8. Prioritization of core tasks (music player example)

Step 7: Identify the Top Core Tasks for Your Product

If you are designing a new device, web page, or system, or you are designing a product for new target users, you will want to end up with a list of the most important core tasks. This is essential to ensure that the design of your product and your user experience innovations get focused.

If you instead already have a product that you need to find new user experience innovations for, you may want to focus your innovations on the most important core tasks, but you may also want to look at lower-priority core tasks for potential user experience innovation.

Step 8: Process and Document the Results

You now have a list of verified and prioritized core tasks for your product, and you may also have found a number of potential future core tasks. You can now document your core tasks in preparation for using them to drive innovation, as described in the next chapter. Consider including photos or drawings of each core task, together with some descriptive text. You can often find images of a specific situation from the Internet.