To-Do List user research

This issue is part of the broader theme, Embedded Analytics: To-Do & Personal Pages, and it's goal is to answer specific questions related to the user experience. Some of these questions will be investigated via traditional UX Research methods--both generative and validation exercises with recruited users--and others will be investigated by analyzing existing anonymized To-Do data.

Beyond specific questions we will also want to ask ourselves how much of the problem validation process would be helpful here.

Specific questions raised so far include:

User Research

1. How widely are To-Dos used by our customers? Are there specific usage patterns we should be aware of in different free / paid tiers?

2. What do people love/hate about the To-Do List today?

3. What assumptions are we making about To-Do usage based on PM usage of these features vs developers, team leads or even personas we wouldn't expect to use them? Are expectations about response time different across personas or companies, for example?

4. Which metrics best influence user behavior (so as to improve cycle time) and promote understanding? What is confusing or counter-productive to share? What layout works best?

5. Can we find users who have tried to use To-Dos and given up? Why did they quit?

6. How many users don't know To-Dos exist? How can we help them find the feature?

Data Analysis

1. How frequently do To-Do lists of various users spin out-of-control?

2. How do our projections for likelihood to complete compare across different users? Similar distributions?

3. How would we characterize usage of To-Do lists across different usage patterns? Does it go from many times a day to never or are there active users who use the page less than daily?

Specific Assumptions to Validate

1. We assume that bulk mark done action in To-Dos is most commonly used in the scenario where the number of To-Dos has grown to the level the user wants to start with a clean slate.

In the data this would look like infrequent use of the feature to clear larger numbers of To-Dos especially when regular use of To-Dos does not succeed in clearing the queue. On the other hand, if we see customers regularly clearing the queue with a mix of single To-Do completion and bluk To-Do completion on the same day, this would suggest that the button is primarily used a bulk selection mechanism with a similar meaning as mark done clicks on single rows. We ought to also explicitly ask users about this in interviews.

Is this a cross-stage feature?

To-Dos are the domain of groupproject management overseen by @gweaver with whom we will confer as we work in this area.