Market research: focus group studies.

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Permalink Reply by Val on February 12, 2009 at 10:48am

The folks at Trusera do a lot of focus groups. I'll forward this to them for comment.

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Permalink Reply by Jude on June 4, 2009 at 5:19pm

Sorry for the tardy reply! While at Trusera, I did a number of focus groups, roundtables and usability sessions. While I've always been a big believer in usability, I am a late convert to focus groups. My previous experience is they were used as a substitute for decision-making, i.e. "let's ask the customers, they'll tell us." That wasn't particularly successful.

At Trusera, we had enormous success with focus groups as a way of a) clarifying the customer problem, b) understanding the ecosystem of alternatives that surrounded our customers, c) putting some "flesh-and-blood" around abstract concepts, d) getting great product and feature ideas. Alternatively, Usability groups were likewise very useful in a) really streamlining key processes (like content creation and registration), b) getting feature ideas, c) and, not really intentionally, getting feedback on our overall product strategy. We then used roundtables of friends and family for very early, very cheap and more conceptual problem-solving. They were mostly useful as a) just a basic sanity check and b) an idea starter.

Here are the three customer research group types that we used with answers to your questions above:

Usability
I basically modelled this right out of Steve Krugs' Don't Make Me Think. In a nutshell, his philosophy is do usability in-house, very cheap usability testing with as many people as you can every month. Do not make it a consulting project; do not stress over the demographic fit of the audience; just do it and constantly. We used a video camera, a snazzy screensharing application called SilverBack and two rooms. In one room, I or a member of my team interviewed the candidate. In the second room, we had as many of the stakeholders as I could corral. We then did a post-session review all the folks in attendance, generally devs, designers. Remember that you'll need video consent forms, if you're taping. You can find all that on www.sensible.com.

Recruiting: Friends and friends of friends; eventually Craig's List. CL was spotty, as you'd expect, but we did have some success.

Budget: $300 per month ($50 manicures x 6 sessions per month). The going rate for paying strangers to review your product for an hour is $50-100. Additionally, $200-300 in h/w & s/w

Stuff: 1. Silverback's incredible and cheap usability app, gives you capture, but more important gives show you screen clicks. 2. A cheap video camera, 3. A long cable to , 4. A cheap TV.

Alternatively, you can outsource usability. The folks that I'm most familiar with are Blink Interactive in our area.

Focus Groups
I attempted this on my own and then quickly worked out how hard it is to do a really demographically-specific recruit, organize a facility, and execute. (The recruiting alone will kill you.) In usability, I was interviewing women of essentially any age, then grading the results on a curve depending on how approximate they were to my customer. In our focus group work, we were really trying to understand a few very specific sets of customer persona (breast cancer survivors; newly diagnosed breast cancer patients; use the internet more than X and less then Y, autism parent veterans; parents of newly diagnosed, etc.) I outsourced the recruiting, facilities and moderation. That felt like a the right decision. Trying it on my own for a while helped me understand where I was getting my money's worth!

Recruiting: With the filter above and some others like it, I hired Gilmore Research.
Budget: We ended up doing a session of 10-12 people + 2 alternates; facilities with a viewing studio; video and audio recording; and food for attendees for about $2800 per session. I believe this is cheap if you compare it against others companies, but I'd love to hear the experience of others.
Stuff: All was provided by Gilmore. We did also hire a moderator to run the session. I used Lorraine Ketch at Fuel, who performed perfectly and helped us with analysis.

Roundtables
By a "roundtable," I mean a moderated discussion with a group of potential customers where the goal is to get the group's feedback on needs and reactions to ideas and functionality. We did this early on with concepts and wireframes.

Recruiting: We did friends and family.
Budget: Minimal.
Stuff: A good tape or video recorder.

Hope that helps!

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