Average Task Completion Time: a measure of efficiency

Average Task Completion Time: a measure of efficiency


How long does it take visitors to successfully complete a specific task? You can now see the average completion time for every task. The time starts once visitors select “I understand” and stops when the visitor clicks “I’m done” (texts may differ per setup).
Overall & task specific average Completion Time

Measure of Efficiency

The time users spent on completing a task is a measure of efficiency. It’s a metric that’s easy to interpret and share with colleagues and clients. Users taking a long time is often an indication that there are problems with the interface. It will hopefully give you some pointers for web analytics/usability deep-dives.

How is the Task Completion Time calculated?

The start and stop time of a task is calculated for a specific task:
  • Start
    The time starts as soon as the user clicks “I understand”.
  • Stop
    The time stops when the user clicks “I’m done!”. 

How accurate is the Task Completion Time?

The task completion time cannot be compared to a task time that’s calculated during a moderated usability test. In this case, it’s an unmoderated measurement, which means fluctuations are insurmountable: users can go and grab a coffee and/or have a phone call in between. It’s important to realize that the task completion time gets more and more accurate with more data.   

Why only report task completion time?

A failed task has an indefinite task time: the user will never be able to complete the task. But it’s something we’re working on! In one of our next releases, we will also present you an average task time (regardless of success or failure) and the time take users took before giving up: it will give you an indication of your user’s leniency: will they give you a fighting chance or give up in seconds?

Is the task time actionable?

If you have a low completion score, don’t focus on the task time. The task time will become valuable once you’ve reached an 85% or higher completion score for a specific task. You’ll want to investigate if there are ways to improve the user experience so users can complete their task even faster. 

    • Related Articles

    • Running the Task Workshop: A How-To

      Ok, let's walk through the workshop. Make sure you are prepared to run the Task Workshop. Before you start Communicate the goal of the workshop Communicate that an 80 percent complete survey is good enough for the workshop. The final 20 percent ...
    • Preparations for running a Task Workshop

      Follow these guidelines to be well prepared for running the Task Workshop. The Task Workshop is also referred to as an “Onboarding Workshop”. Expectations The overall target for the Task Workshop is to design the survey, set up the pop-up invitation ...
    • Reassign “Other” tasks

      Sometimes you’ll find tasks in “Other” that are already in your task list. You can now reassign “Other”-tasks to an existing task. Completion score, task time and comments will be reassigned as well. What is an “Other”-task?If a user can’t find the ...
    • Does Task Analytics influence the performance of my website?

      The short answer is NO. We take the customer experience of your visitors very seriously. That means we want Task Analytics to load without compromising the loading time and speed of your website. The Task Analytics script of ~7 kilobytes will be ...
    • The benefits of integrating Task Analytics with Hotjar

      Looking at videos of your users is one of the best things you can do to understand how they interact with your website or app. But setting up and recording users is one thing, analyzing and interpreting the result is a different ball game. You’re ...