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When you "have" to do a focus group

Most UX researchers will parrot the line that focus groups are terrible, and even if they are parroting, they're right. Erika Hall, in Just Enough Research, calls focus groups "research theater."

But often, you'll find that budget and/or time constraints can manipulate your beautifully planned user research into a focus group. Is there anything you can do about it?

As usual, Pentagram and other gatekeeping haters be damned, design thinking (or human-centered design) comes to the rescue. Co-design doesn't just mean working in cross-functional teams in your own organization, it means involving your users. If we truly believe that they know best, then why not involve them?

About a year ago, I got access to a group of young people who were acting as an advisory board to a client. The client made e-learning modules for an urban teen market and we were building the interface and helping with their product design philosophy. The problem with this access was that not only were the kids biased — they had volunteered for the position and were paid a stipend — but when they got together they were effectively a focus group. All of them were smart and motivated, but they weren't always motivated to give the kind of feedback we needed, and we continued to see patterns of one person leading the group (a standard focus group behavior).

Since we met them regularly, I started to give them homework. They put together mood boards and talked about the kinds of sites they regularly visited. Maybe they all colluded, but it didn't matter quite as much because it was an intentional collaboration on their part in this case.

Then we eased into some design thinking exercises, and conducted a design studio workshop. I instructed them to think of the particular details of what made them frustrated with, apathetic to, or unable to operate the current layouts. Then they drew. Standard practice applies here:

  1. We were remote, but I instructed the moderators to give them sharpies so we didn't fall into the detailed drawing trap.
  2. The youth liaison to the company, as well as the product leader and another product manager, participated.
  3. The drawings were timeboxed, then presented and lightly critiqued as a group.

They took pictures and sent them to us, and we did affinity mapping and more detailed analysis after the workshop.

None of this is really rocket surgery, but it's worth mentioning that as long as you have the right participants, any user research should be considered useful and there's a lot of value in being able to "make lemonade."

DiscussApr 4, 2019
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Scott

This one is tough. Mark Hollis recently passed, and that was difficult to process but in the musical sense he was already gone, having left a near-perfect legacy of forward-thinking avant-pop that to most people's minds invented post-rock.

Scott Walker on the other hand, despite his age, was still fairly prolific, especially considering his attention to craft and detail.

I can think of at least 4 moments where he defied expectations: Quitting teen idoldom to write music, Scott 4, his songs on Nite Flights, and Climate of Hunter, which really established the rest of his career. There was nothing else on earth like them. There was nobody on earth like him. And there never will be.

DiscussMar 25, 2019
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Hopefully the last word on Design Thinking

Khoi Vinh, a voice of reason, finally weighs in on the debate with "In Defense of Design Thinking, Which Is Terrible." Apparently he also thinks that most of the arguments against design thinking are anti-democratization.

So when I consider design thinking, it matters less to me whether it leads to a lot of bad design or not. What matters to me is whether it helps broaden the language of design, if it helps expand the community of design, if it helps build a world that values and understands design better than it does today. If design thinking is making us more relevant to the world at large, leading non-designers to embrace the way designers think, then the net effect strikes me as positive.
DiscussDec 18, 2018
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Microsoft's persona spectrum

I think the headline is bait and the sentiment is a little radical — as someone who's been working with more behavioral-based personas for a long time, I'd say there's plenty of use personas still have as a design tool. It's just that people, especially marketers, have been using them poorly for years.

However, Microsoft's inclusive "persona spectrum" idea is great. It helps to demonstrate that accessibility and inclusion aren't just about (for instance) serving blind users, they're about serving everyone in as many cases as we can.

DiscussNov 12, 2018
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PURE Framework

This article came out early last year, but PURE is a new-to-me usability evaluation method from Intel Security and the master of UX metrics, Jeff Sauro. I'm always looking for low-impact, low-cost ways of evaluating the usability of features before (or, god forbid, in lieu of) a full moderated test.

In some cases, that can be done. Even if you're against the idea as a useful method on its own, it can point to the places that need to have full testing done on them. PURE is nice because a decently-trained person can do it without having to hold tons of heuristic guidelines in their head. And you get a pretty nice-looking chart result at the end.

Here's the full whitepaper.

I've created a spreadsheet that calculates up the scores, and some Figma components to build the chart. I think this might be the case I've been looking for to develop a tool for Figma using their API.

DiscussOct 15, 2018
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Design Thinking Considered Harmful

Not long after the recent Fast Co article by the bigtime Pentagram designer about how Design Thinking sucks, here's that bastion of both design and progressive thinking, the... Harvard Business Review? The thing that the author is mad about does not seem to be the kind of design thinking that I have either implemented or learned.

The whole point of "human centered design" is to eliminate the concept of the designer dictating from on high. The version the author refers to, where a holy anointed designer filters the input of the unwashed masses, is something I'm wholly against as well. After all, I went to a two-year for-profit design school. Iskander has the right idea: we should be democratizing design and acting on the bottom-up, boots-on-the-ground perspective that we get from users/customers/beneficiaries and from non-designers in our organization. Unfortunately, it feels to me like she's been given a tainted version of design thinking -- one that I think a lot of other people have also received.

My cognitive dissonance here is that these articles written by people named Natasha can't both be true. Jen, highfalutin Pentagram partner, can't be right about design thinking usurping the dominance of designers like her while Iskander is simultaneously right about the methods actually maintaining that dominance.

At the end of the day, design thinking is, as Iskander says, a dumbed-down scientific method. So to my mind, what you do with that hypothesize-and-test framework can be conservative (blarg), innovative (bleh), or serve people well, depending on your hypotheses, the makeup of your team, and the projects you're working on. Keep the tools in your toolbox, keep serving the people you're designing for, and you'll be fine.

DiscussOct 8, 2018
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Familytronica

I sat down with my son (5) and the Alesis Micron that is now anchoring my live set and we made a little track together. It was going to be called "Disco Slash" but for unknown reasons, he retitled it to the less inspiring "Disco Party." I helped with the mechanics but all the sequencing is him.

DiscussAug 21, 2018
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Making "Heroes"

Here's cool video with Tony Visconti discussing the creation of "Heroes," the title song of maybe the best of Bowie's Berlin albums. It's amazing just to hear the multi tracks — Fripp's brilliant feedback guitar, the crack band, and Bowie's vocal takes, which get written about a lot but prove his power when you hear them on their own.

It'd be easy to take away that the era of true studio innovation with giant budgets and beautiful studios is mostly at an end so we'll never get great records like this anymore, but it's all there available to us. You could recreate so many of these things and more in your own house. The inspiration is what's important, and there's a lot of it in this video.

DiscussJul 14, 2018