Are your current workflows efficient? Do you know where your workflows can most benefit from AI and automation? Did you know that even small differences in task efficiency - the amount of time it takes a user to complete a task – can add up to significant time and expense if it’s a task performed frequently and by many users.
In this roundtable session from K25, we introduce a method called TaskCheck that will help you analyze your workflows at a granular level and uncover the largest opportunities for UI/UX efficiency improvement. In this session, we cover:
- What is task efficiency and why does it matter?
- What is a task and how do we analyze it?
–Learn to break down tasks into steps
–Learn to break down steps into user actions
–Learn how to find and eliminate inefficiencies
- How to use a tool called TaskCheck to analyze task efficiency
We start off by explaining that any task can be broken down into a series of steps and every step into a series of user actions.
These user actions can be thought of as the atomic units or building blocks of a task – the granular level actions a user takes – both physical and cognitive – to get work done in a user interface, e.g. thinking, moving the mouse, clicking the mouse button.
Furthermore, each of these user actions has a corresponding time that it takes the user to perform.
It stands to reason then, that one way to make a task more efficient (e.g. minimizing the time to perform it) is by eliminating user actions or even entire steps of a task.
To this end, we introduced attendees to a method of task analysis called TaskCheck that provides a framework and step-by-step process for analyzing a task and identifying inefficiencies. It also allows us to evaluate alternate UI/UX designs that may have greater efficiency. Finally, we provided some ideas about how to eliminate user actions, and even how to streamline entire processes with GenAI technologies like ServiceNow’s NowAssist.
We encourage folks involved in UI/UX work at their companies to look for these inefficiencies in their user flows – eliminating clicks, scrolls, and especially 'costly' user actions like reading and writing, to achieve happier users, and potential cost savings in their processes.
Please find below a PDF version of the presentation as well as an Excel Workbook you can use to apply TaskCheck to your own tasks.
Does your company suffer from efficiency problems in user workflows? Have you tried TaskCheck yet? Did it help you? Do you have questions about how to apply it? Feel free to leave comments and questions in the Comments section below.
