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Bringing Real World Context into the Focus Group Setting CHAPTER 8

Bringing Real World Context into the
Focus Group Setting
Peter Coughlan and Aaron Sklar
8.1 INTRODUCTION
This chapter examines the ways that IDEO, a design consulting firm, has adapted the
standard focus group methodology in order to better inform its own process. These
adaptations introduce elements of the real world into the focus group setting, and
extend the focus group setting back into the real world. We provide examples from actual
project work with our clients to illustrate how our adaptations have led to a more
effective design research methodology.

Focus groups have long been an important tool in the market researchers toolkit.
Most of what we have come to think of as the standard focus group methodology has
been developed through this market-focused application. As design practitioners,
however, we have found the standard focus group methodology to fall short as a useful
design tool, for two important reasons.

First, the standard focus group relies heavily on what people say they do or think
they do, rather than what they actually do. In our experience, we have found verbal
accounts of behaviour to be less accurate than observation of actual behaviour in real
world settings. Humans are great confabulators when put on the spot, we can usually
come up with a verbal explanation of a particular behaviour or feeling (Oh, I do/feel X
because of Y). When we scratch below the surface explanation, we can often find some
other variable at play, one that we are not able to articulate because we are not conscious
of it.

Second, focus groups cut people off from the contexts where they live their lives.
People use their environments and tools to prompt them as to the next step in a sequence
of steps; places prompt memories of past experiences. Sequestered in a barren room with
a handful of strangers, people are stripped of some important resources that would
ordinarily help structure their behaviours. Without these resources, we must rely solely
on their accounts of their behaviours.
8.2 SOME BACKGROUND ABOUT IDEO
IDEO is a design consulting firm that helps its clients to create new experiences through
the creation of products, processes, environments and communications. Fundamental to
our process is a deep understanding of how our clients customers or other stakeholders
(such as employees, collaborators and users) behave in the real world. Most business
people only know their stakeholders as members of particular market segments, with a
specific demographic or psychographic profile; few spend time seeing these stakeholders
as whole people, watching them experience life (or their companys products or
processes) in everyday settings. 130
Focus Groups Supporting Effective Product Development

At IDEO, designers and design researchers inform the design process by looking at
real world behaviour that is, by understanding and observing behaviour in the everyday
conditions in which design solutions will be adopted and adapted by various users
.
At the
onset of a project, research helps the design team to discover unique and innovative
opportunities and concepts. Through observation of people in everyday contexts, engaged
in everyday activities, we seek to reveal peoples unmet needs, or the ways in which
existing designs fail to support their behaviours.

During design development, research is primarily employed to test prototypes of
potential concepts by observing how users react to and employ the prototypes during
tasks we ask them to perform. The findings from this prototype testing then inform
subsequent refinement of concepts.

During the discovery phase of our work, market-research-style focus groups are not
a mainstay of our design research process. However, during prototype testing, we have
developed numerous variations on the focus group methodology to help inform our
design process in ways consistent with our earlier methodologies.

The following pages describe our experiences with the use of focus groups, and
provide suggestions about how to augment the more traditional focus group methods to
better support the design process. Underlying all of our changes to standard focus group
methodology is a desire to re-introduce context to the somewhat decontextualised setting
of the traditional focus group or, in other words, to augment the focus group setting
with some of the trappings of the real world, and peoples real-world behaviour.
8.3 FIRST AND FOREMOST, USE FOCUS GROUPS FOR THE RIGHT
REASONS
Perhaps the primary reason that focus groups have gained so much popularity as a
research tool in product development is that they provide a means for members of a
development team to get relatively quick input or feedback about a potential design
direction. In a period of a couple hours, the team can get a qualitative understanding of
multiple potential customers personalities, as well as their reactions to a series of design
concepts or directions. In order to bring eight to ten individuals together for a discussion,
however, we must often ask research participants to check their individuality at the door.
In the space of two hours, there is little opportunity to explore some of the very things
that designers find so interesting and inspiring peoples passions, quirks, pet peeves,
rituals, or the behaviours they have developed to cope with a poorly-designed product,
service, or environment.

Although these (seemingly mundane) behaviours and beliefs often provide the
inspiration for innovation, they rarely surface in a traditional focus group setting. For this
reason, IDEO believes that focus groups are better used in some parts of the design
process than in others. In general, we counsel our clients to use focus groups not for
discovery, but rather to test ideas that have been created after new concepts have been
discovered through other means. Discovery is triggered by looking at how people interact
with one another and with designed objects in real-life settings; in how they engage with
existing products, services, environments, communications, and systems; and in how they
cope with change on a day-to-day basis. This kind of information is difficult, if not
impossible, to capture in a focus group setting, where research participants have no
access to the very artefacts that trigger and support their day-to-day behaviours.

One client we worked with had conducted focus groups at the onset of a design
development program in order to help them with the design of a new website that offered
web-based software services. The moderator for these sessions asked some potential Bringing Real World Context into the Focus Group Setting
131
software customers to describe the perfect online software service. Participants spent
the better part of two hours talking vaguely about good service, general brand values, and
what services they thought they might need. At the end of the two hours, the clients
general direction had been validated confirming what they had already suspected before
the start of the groups. Yet no specific direction had been identified as to how the
service(s) could or should be designed or integrated into existing needs and behaviours.
Nor was the client any closer to understanding how to create an interface for their users,
or how to manifest their brand in that interface.

For answers to these questions, our design team sought out people whom we felt
might need the services our client had to offer. We went into their offices and were given
guided tours of their physical and virtual desktops; we visited our subjects favourite
websites, and shadowed them as they worked. We looked for recurring patterns and
problems in work processes patterns and problems that a new service or set of services
could seek to build upon or address. With a better understanding of the end-users daily
lives, we were then able to create concepts informed by the types of software and
services already being used, the environments where work was being done, and the work
practices of the potential users of the new services being designed.

By conducting a small number of contextual observations, we collected fewer
overall perspectives than we would have in a focus group setting. However, we came to
know each person we observed in much greater depth than a focus group could provide
us. Designers like to know minute details about their target users, so that they feel they
are designing for a real person and not a profile of a target market group. In the case of
the project described above, the design team learned how users organised and decorated
their desktops, how they filed physical and electronic documents, how they navigated
from program to program, etc. By understanding a user or group of users at this level of
detail, the designers were able to generate insights that responded to a real set of users
unarticulated needs and aspirations. These needs and aspirations provide a valuable
source of innovation because, before our process of discovery, they had not been
articulated before.

In the focus group setting, participants do not have the contextual prompts available
to us in our day-to-day existence, and must therefore recall their behaviour from memory.
In the course of our field research, we have frequently observed that people do not do
what they say they do; nor do they do what they think they do. There are many reasons
why peoples opinions do not matc