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How To Run A Useful Focus Group Or Usability Study

One of the things I find most annoying is focus group reports.  "9 out of 10 of our test group gave us 5 stars".  You ever ask a stranger what they think of your out fit?  You could be wearing a clown suit and flip flops and 90% of people would tell you, you look good.  You want to get good feed back, don’t ask dumb questions, ask hard questions.

Usability studies work in two modes, observation and feed back.  Observational studies can be expensive because to get good feed back you need to record what the user is looking at, how many wrong steps they took to complete tasks with your hardware or software. Feed Back studies can be frustrating because if you don’t know what to ask, you won’t get good feed back.

For usability studies of software Camtasia is an amazing tool. Give your subjects a couple of tasks to complete.  Recording the steps they take to complete this tasks, and the "mis-steps" they take as well. Often discovering good usability means discovering where users expect things to be, rather than where you put them.

Feedback studies require working very hard not to lead the subject.  Often the feedback you get is based on the way you ask the questions.  For this reason when I build a feedback study I take a strong bias against the product.

If you want the best feedback encourage people to tell you what is wrong with your product. "What features are most lacking in this product?" is my personal favorite.  You will get some really bad answers, but this sets the tone for open dialog, asking "what features do you most enjoy" is a waste of money brains and time.  You aren’t asking what things people like, because if you have to ask what people like about your product your product must suck more than a focus group is going to save.

In the word’s of Paul Arden, "It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be". 

-- Brandon Wirtz

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