Guess What?!? Task Design is Critically Important! – A hard-learned lesson

Years ago, we were watching people try to find products on IKEA.com. (Not for IKEA, but for our other nefarious purposes.) We took several stabs at our study because, well, the first ones seemed fishy to us.

Our initial stab had simple tasks. One of them was “Find a bookcase for your living room that can hold 200 books.” Seems straightforward and nearly everyone completed the task easily. In fact, it seemed too easy.

It turned out that after reading the task instructions (we often write them on paper instead of delivering them orally, so the participant can refer back), every participant did exactly the same thing. They clicked in the search box on the IKEA home page and typed Bookcases. From here, it was pretty easy to get to the right product.

Yet, it was because everyone did the exact same behavior that made the UX hairs on the back of our neck tingle. That didn’t seem right.

In a second round of studies, we changed the task description to something more context-rich, avoiding any clues as to what to type in to the search engine. We ended up with:

“You’ve just moved into a new place with a living room that you love because of its expansive walls. Now, you just need someplace to put those 200 prized books that you’ve had in boxes forever. How would you do that?”

As we suspected, our participants’ behaviors changed. A couple folks typed bookcase into the search box. Others typed shelves, book shelves, book shelf, and one shelves for books. And others didn’t type anything into the search box, but clicked on the navigation links on the page, including storage systems. Most (but not all) found success using their own strategies.

What was happening was that we had guided the users with the wording of our task. By changing the wording, we saw different usability results. The design was the same, yet the results changed because of what we asked the users to do.

The wording we choose for our tasks is a critical component of the research we do, yet we hardly ever see any discussion of how to do it right or what happens when we get it wrong. If we want to make sure we’re guiding our teams in the right direction, we definitely need to nail the right research at the start.