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.
There seems to be a bit of a trend at the moment, within developmental circles to just add a few wireframes and develop a prototype or two, and then you can declare you are across the user experience design process.
The thing is User Experience is a lot more than just a few simple techniques, it’s an entire collaborative design process, in a way it’s not just a single methodology at all.
This lack of being a single methodology may be part of the issue.
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.
Listening is one of those skills that no one really talks about, and yet listening is critical to User Research and general business as well.
You have to understand, and in some cases even become emotive, with the users you are listening to. Yes we can all listen to some degree, but the reality is this will not be that thorough, there will be gaps, major things that you will miss or just did not understand completely.
It follows in the field of user experience listening is critical. Without it you just aren’t going to a able to understand the issues your users are telling you, or worse you will miss important information.
