Do you know what your top tasks – and indeed your super task – is for your visitors?

And if so, does your website make it easy for them to complete those tasks?

This focus on identifying your website's 'top tasks' comes from useability guru Gerry McGovern and his new book, The Stranger's Long Neck: How to Deliver What Your Customers Really Want Online.

(If you're familiar with Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail: Why The Future of Business is Selling Less of More, McGovern's The Stranger's Long Neck provides a contrasting perspective.)

McGovern reminds us that people don't visit to find your organisation chart, or your Annual Report or all about you.

They visit to fulfil their own desires.

The question is, do you make it easy or do you make it difficult?

McGovern outlines a simple survey process that any not-for-profit could adapt to determine what their own top tasks really are. (Warning: they are almost certainly not what you and your colleagues think they are.)

So what might top tasks be for a charity?

Make a donation might be one.

Find out how I can make a difference (eg house the homeless, restore sight, cure cancer) might be another.

How to leave a bequest might be another.

But are you sure?

Having trialled this process already, I can assure you that you will get surprising results.

McGovern goes on to argue that unrestrained websites with excessive, unclear and contradictory information are driving your customers away.

The success of a website should be measured not in the number of visitors, but in satisfied customers who have done what they came to do.

The key message from McGovern is that you should maintain a relentless focus on your user's needs – not your own, and that constant testing and improvement is far more important than a radical overhaul or redesign.