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Microsoft Production Reaction Cards (doc)

The set includes 118 words which presumably you would reorganise, format and print off as individual "cards". I've never used them but I do see how the tool could be useful. My only concern is that there are too many words and it could make it unwieldy to deploy in user testing.

What are your experiences with using the MS PRCs? How did you present them to people and did you find that the list could probably be culled significantly? Can you break it down into groups and focus it at specific questions to elicit responses from that group of words? For example you could group the words relating to credibility and deploy them for questions relating to credibility: Trustworthy, Consistent, Dated, Inconsistent etc.

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It's a good question, but I don't have a good answer! – Philip Morton Dec 23 at 9:58

3 Answers

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Hi,

We use a subset of these (with some minor modifications) for post-test exercises. There are a variety of ways of presenting them - one of the easiest we have found is to pre-prepare several print outs so the words are presented in a random order (different for different participants). Each participant then crosses out those they DO NOT think apply. We then have them do a prioritisation task with the ones remaining.

We are still working through factoring out some of the words but it is much more complex than you might at first think in order to produce a reliable test instrument (just read anything about standardised questionaires and you will see what I mean) - with the PRCs and other tools like them it is interesting to probe why people select any of the cards qualitatively - this can reveal some 'interesting' interpretations and is particularly important in tests will low numbers of participants where you can find there is actually a good level of overall consensus it is just that the participant chose to express it via the instrument differently (in this case the instrument is used more as more of a probe than an analytic device)).

For instance 'dated' is not always a bad thing... some people can take this to mean 'you put dates on your documents/posts which is really useful', sometimes dated means 'authoratitative' rather than 'old fashioned and out of date'

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We find that asking people to sort through a stack of product reaction cards is an unnecessarily fiddly way to get satisfaction data. Instead, we print out the adjectives as a checklist and ask people to select the ones that apply. We've created an Excel spreadsheet that makes it easy to adapt the instrument to your own purposes and create a tag cloud of the results.

However, I'd re-iterate Jon's comment about using it as a probe. The best data comes from the post-test interview, where you ask people why they picked certain words.

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We use this routinely because generating word clouds in wordle is fantastic for presenting a very quick summary to senior stakeholders.

We've done it with index cards and with the Userfocus spreadsheet and I'm toying with the idea of building an electronic version to bolt onto the end of our remote unmoderated usability testing tool.

Whatever the mode of presentation, It's not a problem for us to reduce the number of words/cards because we're using the results as a very crude measure of subjective satisfaction. When we are designing against a set of core design principles I'll put representative words into the target list as a quick test to see if we're hitting the mark.

Cheers
R

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