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April 24, 2006

Tapping the collective intelligence: Word 2003 command poll

By Gerry McGovern

A key challenge is to know what customers do and care about, rather than what they say they do and care about. Here's an approach.

In last week's newsletter, I requested readers to partake in a 'collective intelligence' exercise. Over 300 people did, and I'd like to thank you for your time and effort.

The exercise was based on the Microsoft Word 2003 command list. I had read an article by Jensen Harris, Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft Office user experience team. He wrote about how Microsoft was able to track actual use of Word 2003 through an opt-in program.

According to this analysis of actual behavior, the top five commands used on Word 2003 are:
  1. Paste
  2. Save
  3. Copy
  4. Undo
  5. Bold
Of the 300 plus people who responded to last week's exercise, the top five were:
  1. Copy
  2. Save
  3. Paste
  4. Print
  5. Save as
I have to admit a slight mistake. I forgot to add commands such as Bold, Italic, Underline to my list, so nobody was able to score for Bold. Undo was the 11th most popular in the exercise.

From early on, a pattern of scoring was established that basically didn't change. I tested the results at various intervals from 33 respondents up to 310 respondents. The top 10 remained pretty constant. Bullet and Numbering was not in the top 10 until results from 119 respondents were analyzed. It stayed in the top 10 from there on. It pushed Undo out of the top 10, to number 11, where it stayed from there on. So, from 33 respondents on, a basic pattern of scoring was established that didn't change in any substantial manner.

Below are results of the top 10 command choices:
After 33 responses: Copy, Paste, Save, Save as, Open, Cut, Print, File, New, Undo.
After 119 responses: Copy, Paste, Save, Print, Save as, Open, Cut, New, Bullet and Numbering, File
After 213 responses: Copy, Paste, Save, Print, Save as, Open, Cut, New, Bullet and Numbering, File
After 310 responses: Copy, Save, Paste, Print, Save as, Open, Cut, Bullet and Numbering, File, New

The top 10 commands represented 70 percent of all scores given. The bottom 70 commands represented 1 percent of scores given. I have done this exercise on many continents for intranets and public websites. I have never found a situation yet where the top 20 percent of words do not get the majority of the scores, and where the bottom 20 percent get little or no scores.

I have tested this technique in many situations and I have found that it quickly identifies core patterns of customer thinking. (I call the technique Customer Carewords.) What it also does is begin to move the content debate away from opinion. (Everyone has an opinion on content, it seems.) It connects some hard statistics to the words. You can show with numbers that a particular word or phrase is popular and has an impact, while another word or phrase has little or no impact.

If you'd like me to send you the spreadsheet of the results for the Word Command list exercise, email me.

Gerry McGovern

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