Over at simple is better, Iain Barker had recently got me thinking with a post about using Microsoft’s Product Reaction Cards.

These product reaction cards were originally created as a tool for measuring desirability of a system. They work by allowing people to choose cards that they believe reflect their perception of the system they have been exposed to. There are 118 cards in total with attributes that can be interpreted as both positive and negative qualities.

I’ve used these cards recently, not to evaluate a prototype or an existing system, but instead as an activity with project team members to gather aspirational qualities for the system they are creating.

Here’s a format to follow, it works as a good warm up activity before going into with a bit more bite, like a sketching activity.

The format is simple. First print out the product reaction cards and glued them to several large sheets of paper. To start the activity stick these sheets up on a wall where they can be clearly seen by whoever is participating in the activity. Note: Because there are a lot of cards in the full set, I choose to limit the total number of cards by only including those that I felt were positive/aspirational qualities, this however is likely to be adding another bias to the activity since many of the qualities in these cards could be interpreted as either positive or negative depending on the context. I choose to cut down the cards, however you may decide to use the full set of cards. The choice is yours!

Next give everyone in the project team a set of Post-it® notes and marker and ask them to review the attributes on the sheets, and write down the 10-15 qualities that they see as most important onto their post-it notes. This should take about 5 minutes to complete.

When everyone is done, get them to place the post-it notes next to the matching qualities, it’s important that this is done after everyone has chosen their qualities, otherwise they may be influenced by the choices that are already apparent.

It’s fun to watch patterns visibly emerging as people place their post-it notes up on the sheets. You’ll end up with stronger stacks where there is stronger agreement.

As with most group workshop activities, the real benefit doesn’t come from the quantitative results, but instead from the qualitative discussions that emerge so at this stage you’ve really only just begun.

Take some time to encourage a discussion here. A good place to start is to first ask people to reflect on what they see. If that doesn’t work as a conversation starter, ask people why they think some qualities have come clear as being common aspirations, and also to look at the qualities that were not chosen by anyone.

For a deliverable of this activity, you might like to pop the results into wordle to create a word cloud of the results. Team members can then post these word clouds in visible places where they can have a reminder throughout the project of the qualities that they are aspiring for.

Do you have any other ideas how product reaction cards can be used? As always I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts.

If Oprah started as CEO of your company tomorrow and initiated a homepage redesign, what influences would she bring? Or what if it was Steve Jobs instead?

This question forms the heart of an activity I like to run in project workshops that I call CEO redesigns.

I like to run this activity because it helps people to explore a range of different possibilities. There are always multiple solutions to a problem, and as Bill Buxton preaches, it’s important to get the right design before getting the design right.

If this is the first team activity in the workshop, start by forming the workshop group into teams. You might like to try this 5 minute approach to team forming.

Next, give each team two slips of paper, each with the name of prominent organisation, and the organisations founder.

Then give each team five minutes to discuss what they know about the founders and companies that are on their two slips of paper. Ask them to think about the differences between these people and how their distinct style has influenced and shaped the organisations they founded.

After this discussion hand out sheets of A3 paper, sharpies, and give 40 minutes for each team to create a homepage concept that reflects the qualities of each of their founders (so each team creates a total of two homepage concepts).

You could run this activity omitting the step of thinking from the perspective of specific founders, however I find this step useful for three reasons:

1. instead of being immediately faced with a blank sheet of paper, this provides an intermediate step of focused thinking before sketching starts;
2. it helps remove bias from the existing organisational culture and predetermined ideas. The people in your teams have probably been immersed for some time in their companies specific organisational culture. This has probably been limiting their perspective. It’s also possible that there have already been previous discussions about what they consider a solution to be. Rather than each team reinventing that same proverbial wheel this supports teams to open their minds to different ways of thinking; and
3. finally, it doubles the number of concepts. If you ran this activity without the founders, it would only be reasonable to expect each team to come up with a single concept. Having two distinctive and unique founders to draw inspiration from, you’ll find that each team will easily produce two unique concepts.

After sketching is complete it’s probably a good time to take a short break. Once people have stretched their legs bring them back and have each team introduce the new ‘CEO’ and their homepage concept. Encourage people from other teams to voice their own ideas, what they found interesting and also to challenge the ideas within the concepts, and allow the presenting team to justify their decisions.

This discussion is where the real value comes from the activity. When planning time allow about 10 minutes for each concept to be discussed.

Practical tips

• During the drawing phase, give 10 minute time checks to let people know how much time has passed, and how much time is remaining.
• Jump start thinking with a sugar rush by handing out sweets.
• Give people sharpies (or similar) to draw with. Working in pencil or ball point is hard to see, and encourages people to either go into too fine a level of detail.
• Some people can find sketching intimidating. You can counter this by showing a prepared demonstration sketch that shows it’s OK to be messy. It also helps to run an easier warm up activity before this that builds energy and momentum into this activity.
• When teams are presenting homepage concepts, have each team present one idea, then move to the next team. I feel that having each team present only a single concept at a time prevents one concept being favored and receiving too much attention.
• From start to end, allow about 2.5 hours for this activity.

Some sample founders

It’s important to choose people (or companies) that are well recognised and ideally represent a canonical example some attribute (for example Steve Jobs for absolute attention to aesthetics and Walt Disney for a total sensory experience). I’m tempted to add George W. Buckley (3M) or Frank C. Mars (Mars, Incorporated) to this list but unfortunately I don’t think they would be well known enough for people to discuss. I’m also upset that women are greatly underrepresented in this list.

Feel free to use this list as a starting point if you’d like to run this activity:

• Bill Gates (Microsoft)
• Craig Newmark (Craigslist)
• Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google)
• Henry Ford (Ford Motors)
• Howard Schultz (Starbucks)
• Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com)
• Oprah Winfrey (Harpo Inc.)
• Sir Richard Branson (Virgin Group)
• Steve Jobs (Apple)
• Walt Disney (The Walk Disney Company)

If you try this activity, please let me know how it worked out for you!

Also, if you have any ideas for other influential people that could be used as inspiration for designs, please add a comment below :)

Have you ever been in a workshop where the energy feels low, conversation seems strained, maybe only a few people have anything to say, and it feels like you’re hearing the same old ideas yet another time?

Given the right circumstances, anyone is capable of coming up with insightful and interesting ideas, the problem with most workshops is that assume that everyone has these great ideas on the tip of their tongues and are ready to share them with the rest of the group.

Quite often, people aren’t even aware they have great ideas, and sadly, some people think that their ideas are too left field to be shared.

I believe that slide shows, printed handouts, or standing in front of a whiteboard as a facilitator are just a few of the unintentional signals that may trigger to people that they should stay in a listening mode and prevent them from engaging in meaningful and original discussions.

As an alternative to this, when facilitating a workshop I like to plan a series of activities that basically forces participation from everyone, and also gives people tools to help think from different perspectives. A couple of characteristics of these sessions is that you can almost feel the energy in the room growing, and people are genuinely enjoying themselves. Because of these qualities, I like to think of these not as workshops, but instead as playshops.

One of the techniques that I use in some playshop activities is to encourage a friendly competitive spirit by getting people to work on a problem in small teams.

Something that both helps form a cooperative team, and also fosters a competitive attitude is a belief that the members of the team share a unique connection with everyone else on the team.

To do this, I like to run what I call the dream holiday activity, it generally takes from start to finish less than 5 minutes to complete and requires next to no preparation.

I run this activity by sticking to a wall a large sheet of paper with the following four holiday descriptions:

• People watching in Paris
• Relaxing on the beach in the Bahamas
• Skiing in the Swiss Alps
• Shopping and Nightlife in New York

(You might need to adapt these to your audience, e.g. you’ll probably want to swap out the New York option if you happen to be running a workshop in New York!)

Now ask everyone to secretly rank on a slip of paper their order of preference for each of these holiday options. Make sure that people are clear that they can’t enter a first equal choice and that all options need to be ranked.

When everyone is done (I tell people they have one minute) designate each corner of the room to one of the holiday options and ask people to move to the corner that matches their first holiday choice.

Amazingly, most of the time this works quite well to split people into evenly sized teams. But if does turn out that most people choose one particular holiday option you can use the second holiday choice to help more evenly distribute people.

By this method, people are formed into teams in which they share something common, and unique to the team (even if it does happen to be as superficial as a holiday preference!)

With four holiday choices this activity works well when you run it with between 10 and 16 participants. If you have more participants than this you will probably want to add more holiday options to aim for teams of 3-4 people. Instead of holiday destinations you might like to choose movie genres or favourite foods. When trying new categories it might pay to run a quick test via email with some colleagues before the workshop to gauge if there is a good distribution of answers.

UPDATE [14/12/2008] Here are some ready to print PDFs for this activity: Four holiday options on A3 and slips to write holiday preferences.

Try it out! You’ll have fun and from my experience form teams of people that work really well together.