Goals, Activities, Tasks, and Actions in Design
A look at how goals, activities, tasks, and actions shape what product design should center on.
Understand the guiding role of goals in design. Designing around goals, activities, tasks, and actions at different levels leads to different results. Focusing on goals rather than activities or tasks ultimately creates a better product experience.
Many product design failures come from centering the design on activities or even tasks.
For example, some software project management tools keep optimizing how task cards are created and organized, adding richer fields and more advanced settings, but they forget that the product's goal should be to help software teams ship faster. The interaction cost can end up outweighing the efficiency gains, so the product naturally fails.
Although activities and tasks are what users notice, product designers should care more about goals. Be clear about who the most important users are, what their goals are, and why those goals matter. Different roles on a team have different goals, and those goals are not just surface-level; they run deeper.
For example, an employee's goal may not be to finish tasks better, but to make their boss see their effort more often so they can get promoted faster. Some unpleasant products are popular because they happen to satisfy those goals, even when those goals conflict with the company's own product goals.
It only makes sense to create a mechanism in the team that lets everyone's goals contribute positively to building a better product. Otherwise, internal conflicts can seriously damage product quality. Team collaboration with misaligned incentives will eventually fail.