Day 2—Running Killer Groups: Amplifying voices and enhancing user research through group interviews

— Hello and welcome as sensior conultant that works to find with brands for key business insights and focus on holistic research and expert on people

• Thanks to all speakers today for those who shared insights on research methods and impacts

— Powerful tool to help understand our users, so we can build tools that speak to their problems

— Focus on focus groups

• How to use, how to run, and make them acceptable

— Focus groups have bad reputation, but not just about putting people in a room, but much more nuanced, and happens when participants fuel off others ideas and what makes focus groups so powerful

— Some common misconceptions

• Loudest person dominates
• Multiple people means discussion lacks depth
• Only for testing
• Quick and dirty answers
• Hard to control and the personalities
• Bad recruitment and professional partcipants

— Participants tell you what you want to hear

— Still play crucial role in research and provide benefits you haven’t thought of and know that busiensses thrive on understanding consumers and allow us to hear consumer frustration in their own words, and bridge gap between brand and consumers

• Diversity of perspectives and life stage and speed up perspectives

— Understand collective emotions and perspectives and shared narratives and human beings are social creatures and shaped by community and background — along with shared perspectives

— Individual painpoints and collective narrative to share with clients and resources to serve women and success in sector

— Benefit for group identity and gathering questions and solutions together, and sparking information and revealing blindspots missed

• Barclay’s research shaped financial products that met consumer needs and allowed real-time insights, but built trust with customers as well

— Allows constructive conflicts and people can agree and disagree and bring out richer insights and uncover unconscious hidden behaviors with 1-to-1 interviews to miss, and looking confused with certain parts of script and how better to engage demographics

— Drive better strategies and more impactful decisons

— From Richard A Kreuger

• Great way to grasp collective voice, and seeing what’s missed in individual interviews and about innovation and collective narratives

— So what are the use cases and look at research journey

— Here’s where they can play a role, go wide and research topics broadly

• Exploration: Social and cultural context, and shared narrative and market nuance, and what it means from different markets
• Discovery: Hone in on brief and understand decision maker and explore pain-points and innovation
• Development: When developing proposition and refining position and messaging— where UXR can use feedback on how product perceived in market with ideation and co-creation stage and involving consumers
• Validation: Where fine tuning ideas and messaging and concept before long with positioning or branding and test products in real-time
  • Grooming company and using focus groups to hold physical prototypes and led to valuable feedback on product

— When not to use them though?

• Not uncover sensitive insight like personal finances, or health conditions
• Not for understanding behavior and needs on their own
  • Participants shouldn’t know everything about behaviors, so use ethnographic study and more in-depth insight
• Expertise
  • Consumers can’t provide this for technical topics
• Large-scale validation
  • Surveys chatbot testing

— So let’s look at top tips when

— Bad recruitment and respondents, nothing you can do about that

• Bad recruitment equals bad insights

— Pre-screen participants to make sure they align with pespectives, and see for red flags, and attitutidnal questions and engaging mindset and brand perception research

— Great insights come from good discussion guide and getting below surface-level answers

• Engaging guide will uncover emotional insights and clarifying what ideal world would look like and what it could be and storytelling exercises to make sure it understands story of brand

— Role playing how people see brand and if brand was person

— Moderation as performance and natural conversation rather than rigid Q&A, and keep things on traack to explore formats with different focus groups and other groups like triad and

• Conflict of opinions
• Co-creation sessions
• Varying meeting space for authentic discussion, and move beyond sterile groups and running club

— Well thought out environment and adjust session lengths and in-depth interaction and higher impact section

— Practice moderation performance constantly and build confidence to conduct it on your won

— Don’t report what cutomers says and need solid analysis to pull out key insights and go in with strong hypothesis to prove or disprove with analsysis

• Use visual codes to sift through noise and behavioral lens and layering all of this, can get deeper knowledge

— Takeaways and allow for creativity and have fun

— Enter thoughts on how you’ll use groups going forward. Thank you!

Q&A

1. Typically have had people worry about group-think. How do you think about dynamic and preventing it from occurring?
   1. With group dynamics important to set the tone of the conversation from the get-go and the theme from participants
      1. Not talking over each other and bring people into conversation and non-verbal behavior
      2. Allowing other people to hear their voice
   2. From my experience, people are not monoliths in dominating conversation and people want voices to be heard — set scene and allow people to have conversation
   3. Allow contextual analysis to see who was talking the most and what it was like and get to actual insight you are looking for in brief