For example, if we want to know how hospital staff uses an intranet, we could conduct a top task analysis to isolate the most essential actions. Here’s how we would approach it:

First, we assemble a list of all tasks that can be done within the intranet, which could be dozens of items. Second, we list all those tasks within a survey and ask staff to rank them. But here’s the catch: we ask them to select only the five most important tasks. Showing a long list of items while only allowing users to pick five causes them to scan the list rather than closely consider each one. This allows us to capture what are most likely the five most important tasks. Finally, we analyze the results to discover which tasks are essential and which are less important.