Skip to main content

Designing Better UX With Top Tasks

Gerry McGovern

Your instructor
Gerry McGovern

Workshop includes:

  • 🔖  Examples to take away
  • 🗣  Active participation
  • 🎁  Workshop recordings
  • 🏅  Smashing Certificate

Unfortunately, this workshop is fully sold out! But you can join the waiting list in case a ticket becomes available:


Workshop, 5×2h + Q&A Tue & Wed, September 13–27 2022
09:00 – 11:30 AM PT 18:00 – 20:30 CET Check your time zone

How do you know what is important for your visitors if you’re designing or managing a large, complex website or app? Your design should focus on solving their problems quickly — and not prioritize vanity stuff or political compromises.

With Gerry’s proven methodology, you learn how to identify what really matters to your visitors (their top tasks), how to create a great website structure/architecture where information is easy to find, and ensure that these tasks are easy to complete. And lastly, you learn how to measure that things are getting better.


Here’s What You Should Be Expecting:

  • Interactive live sessions

    5 × 2.5h live sessions

  • Practical insights

    From measuring to improving top tasks

  • Hands-on exercises

    With reviews by your teacher

  • Life-time access

    To all video recordings and examples

  • Dedicated Q&A time

    To ask all your questions

  • Smashing Certificate

    A well-deserved reward for your work


We’ll dive deep into understanding what is important for your users. How do you find out, and how do you prioritize these items? Once you know what’s important, how do you structure and design the website around these ‘top tasks’? Lastly, how do you design these tasks so that they are easy for your users to ‘complete’, and measure their success?

Gerry McGovern invented the Top Tasks approach and in this masterclass, he will answer these questions and a lot more.

What you will learn

  • You will learn how to clinically and objectively identify what truly matters to people (the top tasks), and what doesn’t (the tiny tasks).
  • You will learn how to, with evidence and testing, build the most intuitive classification / navigation system possible.
  • You’ll learn a metrics approach based on measuring and improving the top tasks of users — constantly making them faster and simpler to complete.
  • You will learn how to present to management and co-workers to show that the work you are doing is improving the user experience.

Specifically, you will learn three methods:

  • Top Tasks Identification
    Using a unique survey method (that looks rather unusal, but has never failed once), learn how to create a league table of user tasks, clearly showing what matters most and what matters least.
  • Task Performance Indicator
    Once you have identified your user top tasks, how to measure their performance and create a management metric based on success rate and time. Consider the Task Performance Indicator as an improved method of traditional usability testing.
  • Top Tasks Architecture
    How to take Top Tasks data and create a wonderfully intuitive and simple set of menus and links. Navigation design is so crucial to digital success, and yet is so often overlooked. This rigorous method gives you a navigation that your users — will love, or better still, will hardly notice because it’s so intuitive and simple.

Who is this workshop for?

UX designers, product managers, developers and UI designers who want to improve the online customer experience by understanding and improving what matters most to customers.

About Gerry McGovern

Over almost 20 years, Gerry’s Top Tasks method has been used more than 600 times by organizations such as the European Parliament, WHO, Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Toyota, the European Commission, Canadian, Irish, UK, Norwegian governments, and hundreds of others.

You learn about mistakes made and lessons learned. Tips and tricks, how-tos. But no shortcuts! Because Top Tasks is not about quick wins but rather long-term planning and thinking, and slow, methodical processes that build the foundations to solve deep needs.

Time & Schedule

This remote workshop is split over five days. The schedule may change slightly based on how we are progressing through the material, giving time to answer questions as we go along.

  • Tue, September 13, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (Pacific, US) 18:00 – 20:30 CET (Europe)
  • Wed, September 14, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (Pacific, US) 18:00 – 20:30 CET (Europe)
  • Tue, September 20, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (Pacific, US) 18:00 – 20:30 CET (Europe)
  • Wed, September 21, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (Pacific, US) 18:00 – 20:30 CET (Europe)
  • Tue, September 27, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (Pacific, US) 18:00 – 20:30 CET (Europe)

You can always re-watch the sessions at a more convenient time and follow the workshop at your own pace.


Day 1 — Top Tasks Identification; Define

8:45 AM ET
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
In the first session, we making sure we know how to define our users, see what our tasks can be, and understand how we can best shortlist these tasks. We will go through a number of well-defined steps and sources, so you’ll get an excellent idea of how to do this for your situation.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Gerry on the day’s material. Networking!

Day 2 — Top Tasks Identification; Choose and present

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
In the second session, we’ll continue on the foundation of session one and will discuss the best ways of deciding what the actual top tasks in your website are based on voting. We will also spend a good amount of time analyzing that research and — critically in most organizations — present these outcomes to stakeholders in a way that you can implement successfully.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Gerry on the day’s material. Networking!

Day 3 — Task Performance Indicator; What and how

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Once the top tasks have been decided, we have to make sure these tasks will work as intended for the user. We do this by setting up task performance indicators for the chosen tasks. In this third session, we go into how to set these up, what metrics we should be measuring, how to measure them, and how to run tasks and experiments.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Gerry on the day’s material. Networking!

Day 4 — Task Performance Indicator; Measure and improve

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
In session four, we will look into customer journeys, and we will learn how to actually measure the performance of the top tasks. What kind of tools we need for that, and how to analyze the data we are gathering from these. Once we have that analysis, we learn how we can best present the findings to our stakeholders and continuously improve the tasks.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Gerry on the day’s material. Networking!

Day 5 — Top Tasks Architecture

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
In the final session, we will make sure that we can structure the top tasks in the best possible way. What kind of structure should be used for the site, and how will the tasks be broken up. We will go through a structured sorting and classification approach, which has been used for many projects. Finally, we will discuss how to implement and test this architecture successfully.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Gerry on the day’s material. Networking!


Unfortunately, this workshop is fully sold out! But you can join the waiting list in case a ticket becomes available:


x