Death of the Focus Group, Long Live the Product Manager
Focus Groups are becoming less and less a part of innovation. Instead many companies feel they can revolutionize the way we do things by forcing us to learn to do it their way. Other companies just copy cat the methods used by their competitors.
There are a lot of services out there that will provide you with Quantitative answers to questions about users, but qualitative data can be just as helpful, and much harder to find.
Knowing the distribution of users with Red Green color blindness may be useful when waying the color scheme of your UI, but it is harder to know if users will like your new interface that tracks where you are looking to move the mouse, or if it will work when you start having users watch fashion models walk the runway in their underwear and trigger the fast forward and rewind accidentally.
There are instances where companies have the clout to dictate new modes of use. iPhone certainly hit the market with some new ways of interacting with the device, and Apple is notorious for not using focus groups. They instead trust that the designer understand usability and how to create an experience that will change how users interact with a product.
The short lesson here, is that Focus Groups are more and more becoming Quality Assurance, and companies are expecting that if the product is good people will learn to use it.
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-- Brandon Wirtz