Say what the visitor wants, not what to click
Write the task the way a customer would describe their errand: “Find out what the cheapest plan costs and whether there is a free trial.” Not “Open Pricing, then click Compare.” A persona told where to click finds the button even when a real customer would not, and the run proves nothing.
Make the end visible
A persona finishes when it thinks the goal is reached, when it gives up, or when its steps run out. Tell it what done looks like: “you know the total price with delivery”, “you have found the email address and the promised reply time”. Without a clear end, personas keep looking until the last step, and the report fills with “ran out of steps”.
One errand, or a few that belong together
A credit gives a persona 20 steps, two credits up to 30. Opening a page, scrolling, typing into a field and going back each take a step, and a sign-up alone takes about six. A task with five parts, such as sign-up, prices, an article, contacts and trust, fits, but leaves little room for searching. If you want each part judged on its own, run it as a separate task with a smaller panel.
Forms are held back on a live site
On a live site a run never sends a form. When a persona presses the button of a sign-up, contact or checkout form, the step counts as done and the persona carries on with the rest of the task, as it would after a real confirmation. The third form held back in one walk ends it. So a task can say “sign up, then find the prices”, but the run cannot tell you whether the confirmation email arrives. For that, use test payment mode on a test host of your own.
Ask for what the site has, unless that is the question
When we tested our own site with the goal “find an article and read it to the end”, every persona spent its spare steps looking for a blog that did not exist yet. That was a true finding, and it is why these guides exist. But if you already know a page is missing, leave it out of the task, or the missing page will hide everything else.
Ready-made goals
In the dashboard you can tick ready-made goals: sign-up, payment, finding a product, prices, site search, reading an article, contact and trust. Each adds one sentence to the task. Tick the two or three that matter for this release rather than all eight.
An example
Weak: “Test the website.”
Better: “You run a small online shop and want to check your checkout before a sale. Find what a test with ten visitors would cost and whether your pages are sent to a public AI service. You are done when you know both.”
