Services - Market Research - Focus Groups
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What are Focus Groups?
Finding out key information directly or indirectly from your users such as user objectives and opinions on pricing, functionality, value, trust, etc. This may be business to business or business to consumer.
Why you need it
What do your users want from you? What do they think of your competitors? How can your service improve enough to justify a service price hike?
There are many questions that you need to find answers to, and often these can only be addressed by talking to large numbers of your users. Focus groups provide a wide-angle view of what people think.
What we do
We will work with you to identify the information you need to find, and the best methods for finding it. We will then create a tailored focus group outline and use it to gather and analyse the results. Finally we report back to you with these findings.
In detail
Focus groups are a somewhat informal technique that are useful in capturing user needs and opinions both before interface design and long after implementation. Focus groups often bring out users' spontaneous reactions and ideas and allow for the observation of some group dynamics and organizational issues. An added benefit is that you can ask people to discuss how they perform activities that may span hours, or even days or weeks, something that is expensive to observe directly.
We recommend bringing together six to nine users of a similar nature (e.g., level of experience with an interface) to discuss issues and concerns about the features of a user interface. The topics to be discussed during the session are pre-agreed at a meeting between one of our consultants and our client. The session typically lasts between 1.5 - 2 hours and is run by a UBD consultant whose role is to maintain the group's focus. It is our philosophy to make the sessions interesting and enjoyable for the participants by making the sessions as interactive as possible.
Focus groups are typically run in facility with two adjacent rooms with a one-way mirror on the joining wall. This allows our clients to observe the sessions and for the proceedings to be recorded and observed in an unobtrusive manner. We can arrange recruitment of participants, the provision of incentives to participants and the hire of a suitable facility or we are equally happy to allow our client to deal with these arrangements.
It is important to keep in mind that focus groups can provide an insight into what users say they do and not the way users actually interact with an interface. Since there are often major differences between what people say and what they do, direct observation of one user at a time through usability testing is always recommended as a supplement to focus groups.
We will organise and run the focus groups in any required locations around the world (we have recently run groups in Hong Kong, London and New York) depending on where your customers are based. We then collect and compile the results, and analyse them to produce the findings. A full report is created, and we will present this back to your team during a half-day results analysis meeting.
Deliverables
- Two full colour copies of the research report, including:
- Executive summary of findings.
- Overview of methodology used and steps undertaken.
- Key findings from the research.
- Demographic breakdown of the respondents.
- Further researched data on the respondents.
- Recommendations for further steps.
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