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It's something I hear a couple of times a month, and almost always when I'm talking to a product manager, a salesperson, or someone who is unfamiliar with usability.
It's so common that UX professionals have ironically come to call it the "" F "word," a phrase I first heard from Christian Rohrer, now Vice President of Design, Research and Business Services at Capital One.
We call it the "" F "" word not because focus groups are inherently bad, but because, in the context of understanding user experience, they are often the wrong tool for the job.
Traditionally, focus groups have been used in marketing and advertising as a means of obtaining feedback on new products or services. Like a scene from Mad Men, focus groups have been part of the discourse for decades. So it makes sense for a marketing manager to use the lexicon that they are familiar with.
Focus groups provide rich and detailed information about people's feelings, thoughts, and underlying emotional motivation in their own words. In short, focus groups focus on attitude and affect.
Advantages of focus groups
Like many in the field, I have a negative reaction when I hear the "F" word. But I see two main advantages of focus groups:
- Efficiency: You can collect information from many people in a shorter period of time. In just 60-90 minutes you can collect information from 8-12 people. Group dynamics: The unpredictability and fluidity of conversations between strangers can generate novel ideas and illuminate the central emotional motivations behind choices and preferences. Some people are better articulating these ideas, and receiving signals from others stimulates their ability to express their desires and motivations.
For example, brainstorming new products, website features, new flavors or flavors are good for the group to move on and build on.
Or why would some people spend so much more on a premium brand? The group setting is a therapeutic event that helps to discover the core emotions that lead to product preferences. If you understand the root cause of fickle preferences, you can talk about that emotion in marketing, advertising, and product aesthetics.
I did not include "" cheap "" as one of the advantages of focus groups, despite the fact that they are often perceived as the most cost-effective way to collect consumer feedback.
Even a fast focus group with 6-8 participants and a trained facilitator will cost thousands of dollars when you factor in the fees, facilitator time, and the true cost of turning conversations into interpretable and actionable data.
Disadvantages of focus groups
The main advantage of the focus group, "" the group, "" is also its greatest deficiency. This leads to some methodological disadvantages.
- Dominance: Talking to many people at the same time invariably means that some will dominate the conversation; others will tacitly agree or simply be unnaturally influenced by others. Group Thought: People in groups can unnaturally come together according to an idea or preference. Would you have agreed if you were around another group, with your family or alone? Social desirability: Most people do not want to offend or hurt other people and may be more reserved when articulating their true feelings, favoring the expression of more acceptable opinions instead. No independence: Just because there are 12 people in a room does not mean that you can treat the collected data as if it were a sample of 12 people. The influence that each person has even on binary options (do you prefer A or B?) Can make even the simplest calculations suspicious.
These four disadvantages together mean that I treat the views of the focus groups as tentative. It is probably more accurate to call it the "G" word.
Are they the preferences, emotions and desires of the users or are they an artifact of the group? When possible, I like to bring focus group ideas or conclusions to another level of scrutiny with a survey or individual session with users.
We usually don't have time to do both a focus group and a follow-up session, which brings us to our recommended approach.
Session 1: 1 / Usability Testing
I am a champion of usability testing, but I know it is not a panacea. I understand the limits of putting a design with closed tasks in front of a user. Many UX professionals also understand that there is a place for focus groups and often make the distinction between focus groups (what marketing does) and usability testing (what the product team does). At the recent UxPA conference in Las Vegas, panelists on "" Usability Engineers Do Focus Groups Too "" also articulated the difference between focus groups and usability testing. It is common to think of the two methods as separate options, but I see it as a false dichotomy and I think that many of the benefits of focus groups can be applied to a usability test.
In fact, one of the panelists, Jen McGinn, emphasized that the two methods have a lot in common: «» You use a script, you recruit user profiles, you ask the most important questions in case you run out of time, and you recruit from the same way"".
We see that similarity too, but instead of running focus groups, we combined what we found to be the best of focus groups and usability testing into a 1: 1 session.
At the beginning of our session we probe an individual's motivations, goals, unmet needs, and behaviors related to the website or product. After a more open discussion, we have prepared some tasks and interfaces to work with. It is like a focus group with one person.
For example, we recently conducted an evaluation to improve the usability of a mobile credit card website. Part of the project was understanding what needed to be fixed, but also understanding what functionality was missing and why many cardholders weren't using it.
Most of our participants reported that they had never paid any credit card bills on their mobile phones. At the beginning of each session we spent a few minutes with each participant to understand why they had not done it. Some participants would immediately say that these were '' security concerns '', while others would give examples of news stories about credit card information being '' leaked through the air ''.
We did not have a closed set of multiple choice options, but in many different ways we heard users express the same core emotion of fear.
Their main reason for not using the mobile website was not usability, but security. These feelings were expressed by individuals and not by others as a group. It allowed us to quantify qualitative feedback and make some generalizations about the entire user population with only a few users. Knowing this main reason, along with its likely prevalence, convinced the product team that messaging could have a greater impact on use than usability.
Just because you're running a usability test doesn't mean the entire session should be a sterile sequence of superficial movements. Make the most of your recruiting effort and time with the user. The ability to combine emotions and motivations with actual task behavior in a 1: 1 session provides a better insight into the user experience.
There is a place for focus groups in UX research. But the next time you hear the "F" word, consider staying focused and losing the group.
