Applying a User-Centered Taskonomy Approach to a Government Site Redesign

When an innovative approach comes along, I eagerly dive in, trying to figure out whether it will help our clients design better experiences for their users. Take for example, the idea of taskonomy. Aside from appearing to be a take on the term taxonomy, taskonomy is based on the Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) mentality, a framework founded by Anthony Ulwick.

Taskonomy was first coined by anthropologists Janet Dougherty and Charles Keller to reflect a way to organize human activity based on behavior rather than dictionary classification. In the world of building websites, it means that a website menu should be grouped and ordered by what people visit the site to do rather than a hierarchical listing of the organization’s departments.

When we first started the Mass.gov redesign project, we were excited about the opportunity to partner with them to help them make their site more constituent-centric. For us, that meant helping site visitors find what they need to do easily and quickly, thus also saving state government employees time and energy to better focus on governing effectively. 

Read about how we applied a user-centered taskonomy approach to the Mass.gov redesign in the full article on Medium.