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.
Some of you may not know this, I come from a formal science background, I trained as a scientist. However, I don’t consider myself to be one, by any stretch of the imagination. I feel more at home in the design space.
Still all that background in the science arena has allowed me to apply it to the area of User Experience design. A guess it’s like a Science of UX Design.
Tagged: p52, project-52, research, science, theory, usability, userexperience, ux, ux-design, Web Methodology, webdesign
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.
