Online strategy: get those top tasks right!

Are you revisiting your online strategy? Do you want to increase the value generated by your websites or your intranet? Then start first and foremost by getting those tasks right that contribute the most to your business objectives.

This is the key message coming from Mike Atyeo, co-founder and president of Neo Insight, and one of the most popular speakers at the recent J. Boye conference in Philadelphia. Mike presented his ideas at the online strategy track and also ran an extended 3-hour tutorial workshop, helping conference participants to kickstart their efforts.

The long neck: identifying the top tasks

The central concept of Mike’s approach is what he calls the ‘long neck’. Originally developed by Gerry McGovern, the long neck consists of the relatively few but highly important top tasks that your customers will perform on your website, or your employees on the intranet. Most of these tasks will be critical for supporting one or more of your business objectives, such as increasing revenue through online sales, redcuing costs through self-service applications or increase employee efficiency through finding the right colleagues across the organization. The long neck contrasts with the ‘long tail’, a term once coined by Wired Magazine‘s Chris Anderson in a different context. Here, the long tail stands for the large number of smaller, less frequent tasks, for which Mike also had a clear message: leave them, and focus on what really makes the difference.

Testing is essential

Once you have identified the top tasks for your organization, how do you go about improving them? A first step would be to design the tasks applying best practices in usability and user-centric design, but the most value will come from A/B or multivariate testing. Small changes in design can often have a big impact on click-through and conversion rates, which even the experts are often wrong in predicting. And these days there are plenty of good, low-cost tools on the market to make testing easy – so there is no excuse anymore for skipping this step.

Top tasks for mobile

Determining the top tasks on your websites and intranets is also important when you are designing mobile versions. Mobile sites often try to improve usability by offering only a subset of the tasks available on the full site. Apps take this one step further, by delivering just one or a few tasks in the form of a purpose-built application. But which tasks should you focus on? Will the top tasks for mobile usage be the same as for home or office usage? Let us know if you have done any research into this area!

Want to dive deeper?

More information, slides and books on the subject:

• slides used by Mike Atyeo at the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia
• More about the ‘long neck’ theory can be found in the book ‘The Stranger’s Long Neck‘ from Gerry McGovern
• The original Wired article about the ‘long tail’