Focus Groups

Your constantly-updated definition of Focus Groups and collection of videos and articles
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What are Focus Groups?

A focus group is used in usability and user research to collect the opinions of a group of users. It consists of a carefully selected group of participants (between 5 and 10), in a comfortable environment with a skilled moderator (facilitator) who uses a script to ask questions of the group, the answers are recorded and then analyzed and reported to enable further decision making.

Literature on Focus Groups

Here’s the entire UX literature on Focus Groups by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Focus Groups

Take a deep dive into Focus Groups with our course User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

How do you plan to design a product or service that your users will love, if you don't know what they want in the first place? As a user experience designer, you shouldn't leave it to chance to design something outstanding; you should make the effort to understand your users and build on that knowledge from the outset. User research is the way to do this, and it can therefore be thought of as the largest part of user experience design.

In fact, user research is often the first step of a UX design process—after all, you cannot begin to design a product or service without first understanding what your users want! As you gain the skills required, and learn about the best practices in user research, you’ll get first-hand knowledge of your users and be able to design the optimal product—one that’s truly relevant for your users and, subsequently, outperforms your competitors’.

This course will give you insights into the most essential qualitative research methods around and will teach you how to put them into practice in your design work. You’ll also have the opportunity to embark on three practical projects where you can apply what you’ve learned to carry out user research in the real world. You’ll learn details about how to plan user research projects and fit them into your own work processes in a way that maximizes the impact your research can have on your designs. On top of that, you’ll gain practice with different methods that will help you analyze the results of your research and communicate your findings to your clients and stakeholders—workshops, user journeys and personas, just to name a few!

By the end of the course, you’ll have not only a Course Certificate but also three case studies to add to your portfolio. And remember, a portfolio with engaging case studies is invaluable if you are looking to break into a career in UX design or user research!

We believe you should learn from the best, so we’ve gathered a team of experts to help teach this course alongside our own course instructors. That means you’ll meet a new instructor in each of the lessons on research methods who is an expert in their field—we hope you enjoy what they have in store for you!

All open-source articles on Focus Groups

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Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF. (2016, May 25). What are Focus Groups?. Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF.

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