Focus groups are commonly used by market researchers to find out about customers and their opinions. In a focus group, a handful of people who are representative of target customers are brought into a meeting as a group. They may or may not know each other beforehand. As in the interviewing process already described, people are asked questions about competitors' Web sites and about the proposed Web site. If you are revising your Web site, you might ask the focus group what they like and dislike about the site. If you are creating a new Web site, ask them the same questions about your competitors' Web sites. Get their feedback on the proposed Web site by showing them sketches or pictures of how it will work. It is also common to present scenarios of future use to see how these ideas resonate with the group.
Just like the Boy Scouts, focus groups have the motto "Be prepared!" Do not go in blindly and hope you will find useful information. Identify what you want to find out. Have an idea of what you're looking for, and make sure that all of the questions you ask will help you learn whether you're going in the right direction of the social issues of your prospects.
Also be ready for criticism. Although it may sting a little in the short run, it will result in higher-quality designs in the end. Other members of the development team or management can sit in on these meetings. Hearing comments directly from customers is much more convincing than reading reports. Be sure to keep the number of these insiders low so that you don't overwhelm the focus group.
Focus groups are difficult to run well. Often the moderator can be too controlling and drive the group to conclusions that he or she would like to see. Another common problem is that an individual in the group dominates and causes groupthink to emerge as the other members defer. You will have to get the dominating person to quiet down so that you can draw other members out. Find moderators who have experience running a focus group because they will be familiar with these problems and know how to handle them gracefully.
Note also that you may get different results, depending on the chemistry of the people in the group. Sometimes your results will be positive, sometimes negative, and very negative—all in response to the same questions and the same examples. For this reason it is usually a good idea to run a focus group several times, with different types of people, in different geographic locations. Also be careful in your recruiting to avoid professional respondents, focus group members who make money on the side by going from group to group. You want to get people who are representative of your customers, not people who are just conveniently available.
One caveat about focus groups is that, like surveys, you can learn only what people say, but not necessarily what they actually do. In other words, you can learn a lot about their attitudes and their perceptions, but not much about what they might do in practice. This is why focus groups are more useful for the early stages of design, when you are more interested in finding out about your customers than in trying to evaluate what they will do with a Web interface that you have not yet built or even prototyped. This kind of information is still valuable, but it should be supplemented with the other techniques described here.
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