Candice; I conducted a focus group about 4 years ago for a hospital Web site. My advice is to have very specific questions you want answered about your site.
My manager who helped me put the group together had a lot of experience in focus group testing. We wanted to know if people could find information about services, if they could find out how to make appointments online, and if they could find out how to get to the hospital using the site. Our approach was to write a cluster of questions about each issue, then have users test it 5 at a time. One thing we noticed was that the users were much more successful when they could talk to one another. So, after we had 25 surveys, we started telling participants to stop talking to one another. After we did this, people took a lot longer filling out their surveys and some were unable to find what they were looking for at all. The information this yielded was helpful - users could find information better working in groups. We came up with a few actionable items out of all this, first off to change the language and some of the images on the site to suggest to people they might want to work in a group to find information. M -----Original Message----- From: Candace Cottrell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, August 01, 2003 10:48 AM To: CF-Community Subject: Focus Groups Has anyone ever conducted or hired someone for a focus group for their intranet or website? Did you find it helpful in determining issues with usability and functionality? I'm trying to think of things that I'd want to find out from this and came up with: What problems with navigation and organization exist? How people feel about the overall design? What things would make them like the site more? What would make them use it more often? What problems in experience do our users have? Can anyone else thing of some questions or items I should be looking to discover? Candace K. Cottrell, Web Developer The Children's Medical Center One Children's Plaza Dayton, OH 45404 937-641-4293 http://www.childrensdayton.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?forumid=5 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?method=subscribe&forumid=5 Signup for the Fusion Authority news alert and keep up with the latest news in ColdFusion and related topics. http://www.fusionauthority.com/signup.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
