Understanding  Reactions To Content Language

The Challenge

Imprivata's Design department wanted to know what potential customer's expectations might be about the tone and feel of content dialogue and language when interacting with an app in the healthcare field.  Specific information we wanted to capture was how wide was the range of  tones and language that we should investigate in order to have boundaries for possible iterative research.  Should the application should sound and act like a "doctor"  -  safe, clinical, serious - or should it sound more like a consumer app - simple, instructive, helpful?  

The Process & Result

An internal pilot study was done using a modified  Reaction Card Method with internal participants at Imprivata.  Five different scenarios were selected for each "dialogue/messaging"  encounter and three types of language (formal, friendlier,  and very informal, including humour, were used.   Each participant would select a set of  words that had describing how they expected the application to make them feel. They then went through the set of 5 scenarios based on a language type, and  repeated the  word selection exercise again to  describe how the language in the scenarios actually made them feel. Based on the results, we could  a get a baseline of the range of language tone and content that internal Imprivata stakeholders were holding,  and create a hypothesis to use for potential further research.