Determining the user needs are the foundation of any successful user experience. User research plays a critical role in defining those needs. Techniques including surveys, interviews, focus groups and field studies. General surveys and focus groups are very good techniques in helping to define the general demographic and psychographic profiles of your target audience. These help define user profiles or personas which represent the complete range of users in the target audience.

Using these user profiles, a complete task analysis can be conducted to identify specific tasks and the precise actions required to accomplish those tasks. In many cases, task analysis activities consist of contextual activities such as on-site interviews, and observations. This analysis will identify a series of user case scenarios that will be used to define the functional specifications for the product or service.

Typical task analysis activities include:

• Review and organize site objectives. User experience designers should always be reminded of the "why" involved in any project as defined in the site objectives and strategy. This information allows the comparison of these objectives against the user's perception.
• Identify appropriate user profiles . From the market research and supporting product strategy, user profiles will be identified that represent the demographic, background, experience and attitudes of the target users. These profiles will be used to select participants for the user interviews conducted during the task analysis.
• Conduct user interviews. Once the participants are chosen, user interviews will be conducted in an effort to document all the user tasks associated with the project and the process of successfully completing those tasks. These interviews may or may not be conducted on-site and can include various user research activities such as observations, focus groups, card sorting and one-on-one user tests.
• Create task matrix and use case scenarios. By analyzing the detail notes and the videotapes for all the user interviews, a task matrix will be created identifying the key user tasks for each user profile. A series of user case scenarios based on these key tasks will be created to describe the user actions required to complete those tasks. These scenarios will be supported by a complete set of workflow schematic diagrams.