Malcom Gladwell on focus groups
The author of Blink 182
and The Tipping Point
has a good blog
which, though not updated that frequently, is always interesting when it is. And, 6Aers will be happy to know, he uses Typepad. Today he posts on the topic of focus groups and the "taxonomy of reason-giving."
He's actually quoting one of his readers, so now I'm quoting him quoting someone else, on why what poeple say in focus groups can mislead:
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...it seems that because of the artificiality of the situation, the perils of introspection, etc, most market research actually encourages people to answer in conventions, and doesn't encourage the telling of stories. Many of these stories are probably complex and deeply buried such that they are hard to consciously access anyway.
Comments
I can't tell you how many times I've watched my co-workers run a focus group, thinking their users are going to solve some issue for themselves in the software product they purchased from them.
I used to work at Extensis, designing products like Photoshop plug-ins - which would basically add features to Photoshop. I remember our marketing people asking users if they had problems navigating around photos - which the users would answer "no."
Later, when we released our navigator palette, they couldn't believe they were working without it.
Then of course, Adobe took the feature and put it into Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign... :-)
I think that's one of the reasons I dislike focus groups; is that in a sense they represent an abdication of responsibility on the part of the product design team (or worse, they get used by marketing as a means of taking over the product design process.)
If you're a product designer/developer, it's your job to figure out what people want/need and in what form to give it to them. That's what you get paid to do.
It's great to have user feedback-sometimes user's have really good ideas. Look at this alpha-test. A lot of the ideas are good ones. It's a good path for inputs to the product design process. But users lack the skills and experience to translate what they're doing and what they want, into someething concrete and actionable. Also, a lot of them are too nice and have been conditioned to only give "constructuve criticism" when a lot of the time what you really need to hear is "this sucks" or "this makes no sense to me."
I've seen this a lot in the usability tests I've run, where users will literally say one moment this is pretty good and then if you continue talking to them, get them at ease, then gradually they will reveal their dissatisfactions-especially if you watch what them floundering and then you ask them "why did you do that?" There's a real art to getting people to be candid-in a sense, a good usability person has something in common with a therapist or interviewer. They have to be good at making the subject feel at ease and trusting of the situation. Which is, of course, a time-consuming squishy process so it tends to be neglected by companies. While focus groups are a discrete, easy to implement action item.
- djchall