Shoot The Focus Group, an article in Business Week, raises lots of important questions about the validity of focus group research, but the claim that ‘the focus group is dead’ seems to come round with much regularity, and yet it won’t die.
The arguements are well versed – that focus groups will always err to the conservative and ‘known’, that using focus groups to steer strategy is tantamount to trying to drive forward whilst looking in the rear view mirror, and the peer pressure that exists in group situations will result in otherwise sane individuals confessing to the strangest feelings and desires. The article covers all the pro’s and con’s and what’s most interesting is the forceful defence of the focus group in the comments section.
Our own thoughts on the subject in relation to design processes is that focus groups sometimes help us identify a problem, but they won’t provide us with the full solution. They should be viewed as part of a toolkit of informal and discursive tools to inform the design process, not as a quantitive or formulaic way to find out ‘what you should be doing’.