Advice/resources asked for designing a sort of "tasks to complete" layout

Question

I'm creating a site where a user has to perform several tasks on his own. The theme lies close to a market place site where a user puts something online for sale.

• Think about uploading images,
• Writing a piece of text,
• Filling in several information fields,
• Make some choices that influence further behavior (e.g. hire a photographer of copywriter or they tell to do those tasks their self)
• Some more stuff as well which include a few processes they have to follow in order to verify several types of data.

I've been Googling on 'dashboard design', 'todo design' and terms like that but I haven't seen anything that looks:

1. Intuitive (some users may get overwhelmed by the tasks they have to do or choices they have to make, and ofcourse I don't want to scare away users under any circumstance)
2. Clean and ordened, looking like it's all a natural process

The three approaches described below came to my mind.

Kanban like solution I've come across things like a Kanban board but that would also require the user to explicitly set a statusses like 'Todo', 'In progress', 'Waiting for response', 'Verifying' and 'Done'. So I'm not sure if this would be a practical approach due to the extra required activities a user has to complete.

Tabbed interface While a tabbed interface seems logical because everything is there at once and a user completes as much fields as he feels like doing. But I personally think tabbed interfaces are a bit user unfriendly when it comes to input validation upon posting the data.

Table list with tasks This seems to me the most practical approach because the user can take it one step at a time but at the same time it's utterly boring to see another table and also it might seem a bit unclear what I'm expecting from the user. Of course other parts of the web application are using tabled lists as well and they all give access to a specific resource, rather than complete partial tasks for a resource.

I'm looking forward to your thoughts, argumentation and preferably some interesting reads I must have seen before proceeding.

Answer 1

I think i would approach this with a list design and add some sprinkles of gamification on top :)

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}

When a user finishes a task, He will receive a star and points will be added to the total at the bottom. This should be very playful with subtle animations on the star that will pop out and the points will scroll to the new number.

Then a new task will appear on the list, and of course the every step will be saved and available for the user to proceed from the next time he will log in.

Answer 2

Could you look at the nature of the tasks and create grouping in the information architecture? That might help with the design. Perhaps each main content area on the page is limited to one task or step at a time. So, large task can be broken up into smaller to-dos. What's for sale? (Type name of product, select category buckets, add dimensions, weight) What does it look like? (Add photos or hire a photographer steps). Are the steps linear or can they be done in any order? Are all required or only some? Can I post a product without a photo and still sell?