I think it’s one thing to test that your solution works, it’s another to ask an open “what do you think” and expect to get back information that’s quantifiable.

I’ll be sending this around to a few people … Thank you!

Most of the times those focus groups don’t work, because moderators ask the wrong questions in the wrong stage of the design process.

Focus groups work only when participants are involved in an early stage. You can’t develop an product and arrange a focus group afterwards. This is done purely to justify what they did : “Our research shows that consumers like this idea”.

I doesn’t work that way because participants are merely asked for their opinions about an idea. That isn’t doing good research.

Instead developers and designers should involve participants before they have developed an idea for a product. That way you can ask the right questions and eventually come up with better product idea’s.

(Better yet, let the participants a.k.a future users come up with the idea’s. They are the user-experts.)

They don’t have a rolling research plan.

Suggest this is one reason we all get caught in this conversation.

A rolling research plan says we are constantly listening to our customers and learning how to improve. It also suggests that are number of different methods are being used to look for insights.

You may not be able to conduct the most optimal research but there is always an opportunity about different ways you can look forward (if people are listening of course