Do’s and Don’ts for Focus Groups

Don’t Use a Research Plan As a Script

During a focus group, striking the right tone is essential to facilitating open discussion and the flow of ideas. It’s extremely difficult to exercise any control over a discussion’s tone if you are reading from a script rather than responding to comments and ideas as they emerge. Also, focus groups are unpredictable, so you don’t know what new ideas or concepts may surface. It’s important that you be able to respond to new discoveries fully as they arise, and this can be very difficult if you are following a script.

Do Work with a Partner

In our experience, focus groups are the most challenging UX research sessions to moderate, because of the dynamic nature of the sessions, the number of participants you must interact with simultaneously, and the need to strike the right balance between a free-form discussion and a structured research session. Having a partner in the room is incredibly helpful in this kind of setting. Your partner can help out by taking notes, keeping track of time, and helping to enforce structure on the session when it starts to go off the rails. Your partner can also jump in and ask questions when he or she notices that there is a key point that the group isn’t addressing.

Don’t Rely on Your Partner to Help Control a Focus-Group Session

You should introduce your partner as someone who is helping you by taking notes, and you should think of that person as a coach. Only one person can control a focus-group session. If control begins to diffuse across multiple moderators, a session can quickly disintegrate, especially if the two moderators don’t completely agree on where to direct a session.

Do Invite People to Observe Focus-Group Sessions

It’s difficult to distill a complex interchange between multiple people into a report, even when using audio or video clips. For focus groups, it’s common for the dynamic exchange of ideas to be an essential takeaway. The best way to ensure stakeholders get this information is to allow them to observe the sessions. We like to do this by setting up video cameras and piping a feed over a secure network connection to any stakeholders who want to see it. We’ve also found that Microsoft RoundTable is especially well suited to streaming and recording focus groups.

Don’t Allow Observers to Interfere with a Session

As we mentioned earlier, the moderator should be the only person in control of a session. If participants witness others stepping in and directing a session, they may feel that they are also free to influence the direction of the session. As we said, if this happens, a session can quickly disintegrate.

Do Encourage Conversation Between Participants During a Session

Sometimes people find talking in a group to be intimidating, so it can take a little encouragement to get participants to open up. To facilitate everyone’s participation, set the tone for a session by taking the time to chat with each participant before launching a discussion of your planned topics. Introduce yourself and volunteer some information about? your personal experiences to let participants get a feel for who you are.

Do a round of introductions, and really pay attention to what each person says. Follow up each introduction with thoughtful questions that show you really care about who a person is and what he or she has to contribute. If one person seems more comfortable with open communication, begin the session by chatting with that person to set an example of the kind of communication you want, then transition to another participant who might not be quite as talkative. By making this transition, you’ll show more reserved participants that their thoughts and opinions are equally important to you and that they can communicate with you and the group in the same way as more gregarious participants.

Don’t Lose Control of a Focus-Group Session

If a discussion gains too much momentum, it can take on a life of its own and get away from you, so you might spend 20 minutes talking about something that is completely unrelated to your research goals. To avoid this happening, exercise strict control over a session, and don’t be afraid to stop people if they wander too far off topic or take too much time with their responses. But do this by saying something along the lines of I’m really interested in what you’re saying, but I need to get us back to the main topic of our discussion because our time is limited. This way, the participant won’t feel invalidated or shut down. As you get good at this, you’ll find more subtle ways of directing a conversation back on topic by asking questions like So, how does that relate to XYZ?

Also, take the time to identify any alphas in a group. Alpha is our term for people who like to control a conversation and direct its topics of discussion, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Such people tend to have forceful personalities and promote their ideas to a point where they influence the opinions of others. When your focus group includes one or more alphas, try to get their responses toward the end of each topic of discussion, so you can avoid their having undue influence. Be ready to redirect the conversation if they start to pick up too much steam and want to keep talking. If you have two or more alphas in the same group, try to avoid letting them talk one after the other. Insert a buffer between them. If they get going speaking to each other, they can dominate an entire session.

Do Discuss Each of Your Topics and Respond to Ideas As They Arise

As you work through each of your topics and new ideas arise, explore them to see what they mean and whether you can get multiple perspectives about them. Often, when people first introduce an idea during brainstorming, it isn’t yet fully formed, or they may not communicate it effectively. By asking further questions or getting responses from other participants, you can get a much better understanding of an idea. In such cases, a natural sense of curiosity serves you well.

Don’t Dig Too Deeply into Any Given Topic

Remember, your goal in a focus group is to properly frame your questions rather than trying to arrive at definitive answers. You’ll likely find that some of your questions turn out to be less important than you anticipated, while others that you hadn’t considered to be pivotal turn out to be more important than you thought. Don’t feel pressured to leave a focus-group session with all of the data you need to guide your team’s design decisions. Instead, try to leave each session with a firm understanding of your information needs. This can be extremely valuable because it can help you to avoid spending significant resources investigating topics that are unimportant. It can also help you to identify important issues that could seriously hamper your product’s success if you do not address them properly through additional research.

Conclusion

Although UX research and design have begun to migrate away from using focus groups, they do provide significant value when you use them properly. The most important guideline for the effective use of focus groups is avoiding an overreliance on the resulting findings. The findings that result from this method of UX research are not as reliable as those you can gain through more rigorous research methods. However, focus groups can be a cost-effective way of building the understanding that forms an excellent basis for the UX design research you ultimately need to do. The guidelines we’ve presented here can help you get the most out of your focus groups. Of course, it falls to you to exercise your best judgment in determining what research approaches to implement and how to proceed with them. But keep in mind that focus groups are always a tool at your disposal.