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.
Tags: Workshops/Playshops
I love this idea! Will definitely try it out sometime :) Great stuff Matt!
Cool! Let me know how it goes for you :)
Hi that’s a great idea and will try it at the earliest opportunity.. I’ve used the cards for getting aspirational values from group workshops also! We gave the group one deck and got them to choose 3 cards collectively by process of picking their own 3 and negotiating..