There is no doubt content is important, no doubt it’s in fact more important than any design. It’s the primary thing that people come to a website for – the content.
So you would expect new sites to come out with perfect content.
Well we know it’s not the way, still we have websites with crap content.
All the other boxes are ticked, the design just works perfectly, there is a distinct visual experience when you arrive on the site. Even the information structure and labeling allows you to get to the right information.
To often we see focus groups being used as the core evaluation and research tool within a web design project. Why!?
Focus groups are in the main used to evaluate and get recommendations from customers on the proof of concepts or prototypes. They have a strength in gathering people’s judgements, emotions and possible interactive scenarios from the group as a whole.
If you don’t know I have no love for focus groups, I have yet to see them produce any results that have not been tainted or saturated in biases. To the extent that they were just unusable. With the research or evaluation having to be conducted by some other technique later on in the project. Often at an extra expense.
Look around the web, you’ll find them all over the place. MS-Word and PDF forms that you have to download and complete. I would be forgiven for thinking that we have not progressed on the web since 1995.
I know I’m not perfect I have been party to this crime against UX as well.
We know they are bad, so why are we still using them.
Let’s Consider
You’re feel inspired to join a professional association. The website seems pretty good, it lists all the benefits. There is a professional air about it. You can see that some of your respected peers are already members.
Tagged: cms, forms, frameworks, MS-Word, p-52, p52, PDF, project-52, usability, user experience, ux
I have been involved with many user surveys over the years. Some have gone well. Some have been a complete waste of time and effort. The main distinction between them is the surveys that were professionally developed and pretested would succeed. The ones that had been knocked together by a well meaning manager were often destined to failure.
It comes down to this – unless you have experience designing surveys, then it’s best to either hire someone who has had experience and training, or find another way to collect the same information.
