Chapter 9: Focus Groups

Overview

Focus groups are structured group interviews that quickly and inexpensively reveal a target audience's desires, experiences, and priorities. Sometimes vilified by their association with dishonest marketing, they do not deserve the notoriety with which they are often treated. They are neither the panacea for curing bad products nor pseudoscientific voodoo used to justify irrational decision making. When guided by a good moderator, carefully analyzed, and appropriately presented, they are an excellent technique for uncovering what people think about a given topic and, especially, how they think about it. They reveal what people perceive to be their needs, which is crucial when determining what should be part of an experience and how it should be presented.

Originally called "focused interviews," focus groups were developed as a social research method in the 1930s, then refined as a method for improving soldiers' lives during World War II and embraced by marketing in the 1950s. As such, they're probably one of the oldest techniques for researching the user experience. A focus group series is a sequence of tightly moderated group discussions among people taken from a thin slice of a product's target audience. The discussions are designed to make people feel comfortable revealing their thoughts and feelings.

In software or Web site development, focus groups are used early in the development cycle, when generating ideas, prioritizing features, and understanding the needs of the target audience are paramount. They can tell you what features people value most highly and why they value them that way. As a competitive research tool, they can uncover what people most value about competitors' products or services and where those products and services fail. Sometimes they even reveal entirely new competitors or applications for the product or service.

By providing a way to hear a lot of firsthand experience in a short time, they can give development teams an early, solid foundation from which to analyze the product and its users' needs. And as a watchable, tangible, jargon-free method, they engage members of the company in product development who would not normally have the opportunity, expertise, or time to participate in the user experience research process.

In short, they provide a unique opportunity to see reality from the perspective of the user quickly, cheaply, and (with careful preparation) easily. Two people working part-time can set up a series of focus groups, run them, and analyze the results in three weeks. Conducting contextual inquiry research with a similar number of participants, however, can take a full-time researcher almost twice as long. A survey, furthermore, would need to sample a much larger number of people—significantly increasing the complexity of the logistics and analysis—while providing less understanding about the motivations and attitudes of the respondents.

That's not to say that focus groups provide the same information as contextual inquiry or surveys. All three techniques uncover different and equally useful information—but focus groups can be an inexpensive route when you need a lot of solid information in a short time.