Most user experience designers will have heard of the Product Reaction Cards, a set of 118 words and phrases developed for Microsoft by Joey Benedek and Trish Miner in 2002 that can be deployed in a user testing workshop to help people articulate their emotional responses to a product.
The Product Reaction Cards are part of the Desirability Toolkit (doc) that suggests facilitators ask users to choose the cards that “best describe the product or how using the product made them feel” and then ask them to narrow their selection to just five cards. The cards selection process is then followed by an interview where the participant explains why they selected those five cards.
Whilst the 118 card deck seems to work for the creators of the PRC some people think it’s too much – I posted a question on UX Exchange a few months ago about and received responses like “unnecessarily fiddly” whilst another said they use a subset of the cards. Donna Spencer commented:
“at the end of the test the last thing a participant wants to do is go through this big pile of cards. It takes quite a lot of time, but I don’t think the gain is worth the pain.”
Whilst I support the goals of the cards to prompt people and provide a full vocabulary than might otherwise come to mind during workshop sessions I’ve been wondering if there might be a different approach …
Read the rest of my article at UX Magazine.
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