Take it to task

By Lynda Rathbone

Over the past year, I’ve noticed a shift in the way content is organised on websites. It appears the old function or organisation-led way of categorising content is in its final days and the popularity of tagging and the other kinds of user-led content organisation prevalent on social networking sites has begun to influence business behaviour. And thank goodness for that! After all, it’s always (supposedly) been about the user, right?

The social networking sites have focused on allowing users to actually create their own tags, taxonomies and/or content structures. The business world, meanwhile, is taking a page from this book by seeking to better understand the interactions users want to have with their organisations and to set up paths through their sites designed to better allow them to do it.

That isn’t a new concept. What is new is a more formal approach to the issue, appropriately referred to as the ‘task-led architecture’.

Setting out along that route is simple. What task is a user hoping to accomplish by contacting you as an organisation? This could range from buying a plane ticket to purchasing car insurance to changing the record you hold of their address.

Once the task is identified, you then map out the process the user would take to accomplish said task and set up a supporting content architecture around those key tasks and associated processes. This will help establish what the user’s journey should be through the site, as well as the process and will make it (hopefully!) easier for the user to get to where they want to go – quickly and easily.

For those who have a software-development background, the task-led architecture reminds me of setting up a service-oriented architecture, in which you put a system or coupling of systems in place to perform a particular service. But in this case, the website is acting as the service provider to the customer.

Road-testing task-led architectures with my clients has proved very successful. It’s easy for them to map out how they serve their customers and the key processes are related to that. This, combined with the identification of key tasks the users are performing – or that you want them to perform – along with the fact that information architecture can be changed enables site-owners to support a more user-focused design.

And while this approach works well on any type of site, it’s especially effective for intranets. Your employees are going to the intranet to find certain information and perform key tasks – and those tasks are easier to define and support as you know all of your targeted audiences.

An example of this could be booking a meeting room. The associated tasks may be ordering coffees and teas and ensuring you have a white board in the room. The process would be mapped out and defined for your users and then set up in a way that is based on them completing this task.

Used in combination with other more ‘traditional’ ways of organising information based on that information’s hierarchical structure, the task-led architecture can help your users and offer them varying ways to get to the information they are seeking and perform the tasks they came to do.

Unfortunately, there aren’t too many resources online about task-led architectures right now, but it’s certainly an area I think will see some growth over the next year as the amount of content increases and users get more sophisticated.

And as always, please e-mail me with any experiences or feedback you have on this topic at lynda@foursquaremedia.net – especially if you’re doing this yourself.