Spaghetti Testing | Peter Smith

Tasks are the atomic level of web content. They are the basic building blocks that make more sophisticated chunks of content (pages, modules, etc) possible.

I mentioned last week that we are re-doing the top level of our website to be more responsive to our users’ needs.

One of the key things we are working on is a series of topic-based landing pages as an aid for our clients in finding and understanding the key tasks that can be accomplished on our site.

But what will be presented on these topic pages? Tasks of course. We’ll be grouping related tasks together, in ways that are are logical to our clients.

So if I were to push my chemistry metaphor further, these topic pages made up of groups of related tasks are like molecules made up of atoms that are bonded together.

Via a combination of tagging and well written copy, not to mention solid design and UX, we hope to be able to build our landing pages — and more — by combining and recombining our tasks in various ways, like a chemist creating different molecules out of their atomic building blocks.

(ok ok so by now I’ve pushed the analogy past its breaking point. Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Next post will move from theory to practice and outline how we are wrangling our tasks into topics.