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NHS Choices: Defining customer tasksOn this page:
Before we could get people to vot on the tasks, we had to define them Sources for the task longlist Duplicates and category-specific tasks Applying task classifications Grouping / amalgamating tasks What is a typical task The final shortlist Steps in finalizing the shortlist And the top task for health is... How to read the table Creating a health task list for the NHSThe National Health Services (NHS Choices) website for England gets millions of visitors every month. It's an excellent, trusted and well-managed website. And this is an important, perhaps obvious point. Nobody sets out to create a customer-hostile website. Few people start a content project with the objective of making the language impossible to understand, or making the navigation confusing. Web teams don't set out to make life miserable for their customers. It just happens. The internal pressures and needs of the organization, the very act of doing your job on a day-to-day basis, make it easy to lose sight of the customer.NHS Choices is determined to be a truly customer-centric website. And it is. However, like even the best websites it can always do a better job. So it asked Customer Carewords to carry out a task identification project to get a clearer sense of its customers' top tasks. It was a fascinating project and the result was that there was a very clear top task that ran across every single segment of the population. It didn't matter if you were in Yorkshire or London, rich or poor, doctor or patient, someone with a long-term illness or a short-term one, a patient or caregiver, you had the same top task when you came to the NHS Choices website. (More about that top task later.)
A goal may have made you begin to change how you live but when you come to a website you have a task.
Before we could get people to vote on the tasks, we had to define them.A good way to start identifying tasks is by examining your organization's objectives, strategy, mission statement and other information that articulates what the organization is about and wants to achieve. Why does the organization exist? What does it see as its purpose? Where does it want to go over the next 5 years?Simple as these questions are, many organizations do not have ready answers. This was not the case for NHS Choices. It had a very strong customer-centric ethos, a service focus. Among other things, it had articulated a significant number of customer goals. It saw its customers as primarily the general public, but also wanted the website to help doctors, nurses and other health professionals. It tried to get into the shoes of an ordinary person, to see the world through their eyes. Here are some of the website goals that NHS Choices felt ordinary people had:
We need customer tasks. We need clarity. Some goals can be easily translated into tasks. You must make things very concrete and clear on your website because people search and navigate with concrete tasks in mind; tasks they want to complete. The more ambiguous you are about your customers' tasks, the more likely you are to put up lots of vague, meaningless or misleading information. Sources for the task longlistThe first step in task management is to carry out a task situation analysis in order to understand the whole range of customer tasks that exist. I call this list of customer tasks the 'Longlist.'The following longlist sources are specifically for a public website, but the basic approach to building a longlist works just as well for an intranet. (However, you can't really look at 'competitor' intranets, and using public web search statistics is not relevant from an intranet perspective.)
Duplicates and category-specific tasksWe collect tasks in a spreadsheet with the following headings:
 We would immediately delete one of the "Women's health" entries. Now, what we have left is:
A larger point here is whether we should have a task connected with "women" at all because women are a category or segment of the population. If we do, shouldn't we have "men's health" and "children's health", as well as "old people's health"? Think ahead to how this word will be used in navigational links. Isn't "women's health" very vague and catch-all? It's not really a task but a whole collection of tasks.
It is easy to fall into the trap of the organizational unit and departmental view of the world
Thus, where possible, we create neutral tasks that are not specific to an audience or demographic. (They need to work for women, men, etc.) Here are some examples:
 The list of tasks in the preceding table has been marked as a duplicate of "appointment." However, if you analyze them you'll see that there are two distinct tasks:
One of the most important things the classifications help you do is divide the list into smaller chunks.
Applying task classificationsClassifying tasks is a way of grouping them to make it easier to get to the final Shortlist. Classifications do not need to be exactly right because your customers will not see this list of classifications when they vote; they will only see a randomly ordered shortlist of tasks.Below is a sample of the classifications used for NHS Choices.
 One of the most important things the classifications help you do is divide the list into smaller chunks. A longlist for a large website can be anything from 500 to 1,000 initial tasks. Even when you eliminate exact duplicates and words that are clearly irrelevant, you still might have between 400 and 500 tasks. That's an awful lot of stuff to go through. You will certainly need to run through the whole list a number of times in order to get a feel for it. However, trying to manage the entire list and bring it down to a shortlist is an almost impossible task. If you keep going through a very big list again and again you run the risk of developing list blindness. You need to break the list up into chunks. That is what the Duplicate and Classification columns are for. The following is a sample of what was classified as Treatment in the NHS Choices shortlist. By having the ability to focus only on the tasks in a particular class, you will be able to understand your list much better. You'll be able to really zone in and see things with greater clarity. And, of course, if you have misclassified something it should stand out from the rest of the tasks in that class.  In an earlier version of the task list we had the phrase "healthy living". We ultimately deleted it from the list but we introduced a class called "Live well / healthy living". Here are some of the tasks we came up with in this classification:
Grouping / amalgamating tasksNext, we aim to reduce the number of items in the longlist by grouping them. For example, let's look at a task that ended up on the final NHS shortlist as:
Diet, food and nutrition
This task was actually the result of examining tasks such as:
An interesting thing to understand here is that practically nobody searches for "special offers", while millions search for "deals". I have found over the years that the words people search with are often just a hint at what they really care about. They don't always tell the true and total story, and that's why you shouldn't exclusively depend on the words people use when they search to help you understand what their tasks are. (There are some good examples of this in the Microsoft Office case study in Chapter 10.)
The ideal task tends to be at level 2 of the classification-not too general and not too specific.
What is a typical task?A typical task is what I would call a level 2 classification task. A level 1 classification task is what you will see on the homepage or in the classification at the top of the homepage on many websites. It's a classification like:
So, the ideal task tends to be at level 2 of the classification-not too general and not too specific. This, of course, is not always true-it's just a general rule. As you iterate through your task list, you will begin to get a feel for it. You will get a sense for its unity and wholeness. That's why it can take 4-6 weeks to get a longlist together and bring it to a shortlist. It's simply not something you can rush if you want to get it right. The final shortlistThe final shortlist should be 100 tasks or less. We have experimented with lists of up to 150 and amazingly you will still get lots of people to vote and vote well. However, you will certainly lose a number of people because of the list length. 100 is a very long list-and I know it shouldn't work; I know it breaks all the rules-but a significant number of people will vote on a list this long.Steps in finalizing the shortlistGetting to the final shortlist is an iterative process. When the original longlist is about 500-600 terms, you need about five sessions lasting 2-3 hours each to examine and refine the list. In these sessions you should aim to include no more than five people. These people should have authority, experience, and a true feel and understanding for your customers.As you bring the list under 200-preferably in the region of 150-it is of great use to bring a number of experts (three to five generally) through the list individually. Sit down with them and ask them to read over it. This will take about an hour. The following kinds of questions should be asked:
And the top task for health is …"Check symptoms" is the top task on the NHS Choices website, whether you are a doctor or a patient, rich or poor, living in the North of England or the South, whether you have a short-term illness or a long-term one. How to read the table
 As you can see from the following table, 'Check symptoms' was the top task for all professional categories:  There were a few areas where 'Check symptoms' was not the top task. It was fifth for males, with their top task being 'Book an appointment online'. The fourth task for males was 'Get medical records online', perhaps showing a greater desire for self-service and convenience among males than among females. For those over 55, 'Check Symptoms' was not the top task because, basically, they already know what they are dying of. Top Tasks Management Solutions Email Customer Carewords The Stranger’s Long NeckThe above is an excerpt from Gerry McGovern’s latest book, The Stranger’s Long NeckFrance: Buy from Amazon Germany: Buy from Amazon Japan: Buy from Amazon |
Customer Carewords is a unique scoring technique enabling customers to tell you in precise, statistical terms their top tasks when they arrive at your website. More |
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