Have Focus Groups Had Their Day? Asks Neil Perkin.
Excellent question. I've had a background process running in my mind for almost a year now, waisting brain cycles on thinking about Focus Groups, from results of some experiments we did with regards to UX on smart phones. And the more I think about it, the more I tend to agree with Neil.
Yes, it's always been said that focus groups should be handled with extreme care. It's easy to have bad results from these studies or, at best, a few incremental improvements to existing problem spaces. But even with a good facilitator, this research method leads to the appearance of Alpha individuals amongst participants, thus quickly skewing the main goals of such studies.
Instead, to attain the goals of focus groups, I'd suggest two complementary approaches: Ethnography — thus studying what users do and say, in their own context, as well as what they don't do and don't say — and Design thinking — a thought process of understanding user-faced problems and finding appropriate solutions.
This way, one will deeply understand the setup and constraints imposed to and by users interacting with a given system, and disrupt it without relying on biases introduced by users' personal experiences.
