Both depth interviews and focus groups are useful methods to help discover how people feel about a topic, product or service. In this article, Rachel Booth will explore what a focus group is, the key benefits of running a focus group and some of the risks.
What are focus groups?
A typical focus group involves six or more (usually no more than 10) people who gather in a neutral location, either in person or remotely, to discuss their opinions and feelings on a topic. Sessions are led by a moderator and usually last between 60 – 90 minutes. Anything longer and groups tend to be unproductive and it may become hard to schedule with participants.
Focus groups gain insight from discussions rather than individual responses, and produce qualitative data. It’s important to remember that focus groups are based on participants’ opinions, feelings, experiences and expectations and not behavioural insights.
Caption: Focus groups let people discuss their views and together, which can lead to a different type of insight to a one-to-one interview
Formative research value
As well as discovering how people feel about a topic, focus groups can help to generate ideas or improvements for new products or features. They can bring about unexpected themes and discussions which may be useful to your research.
In some cases, organising focus groups can encourage clients to reach out to their community of users, and help users feel more invested in a client’s resource.
Focus groups are great at gathering reactions to concepts and encouraging conversations about a shared experience. Group discussions often prompt participants to deep dive into topics of interest to the group .The results reflect how users really feel about the topic.
Depending on how many groups you run, focus groups allow you to reach more people at a high level in a shorter period of time. Therefore, if you want to gather a quick consensus on a topic or product from a range of people, focus groups are one of the best methods to use.
Avoiding challenges
There can be pitfalls that you need to be aware of and plan for, before deciding to run a focus group:
- Dominant and loud participants can skew the sessions;
- Discussions can go off track if not carefully moderated;
- Discussions can take longer than expected, so the moderator may only be able to ask a certain number of questions
- Less opportunity for in-depth exploration of a topic compared to 1-to-1 depth interviews;
- Individual responses can be influenced by the group’s view.
Want to learn more about how we run focus groups? We offer various user research fundamentals courses which cover focus groups. Sign up now to our Customer / User Research Methods course.
Alternatively if you are looking for support in running your own focus groups then contact us.
Related Posts
