First of all, I have never seen anything useful come out of a focus group. Marketing, design, whatever...useless. The only reason to do a focus group is that your management/client likes them and wants you to do one.
But on to the actual topic: There's a difference of scale here. Great new ideas virtually never come out of listening to your users because the user focus is on making their own day-to-day life a little easier. That's why so much bad design (in the broadest sense) is perpetuated. Users are accustomed to it and they want incremental change...slight betterment, something that will make their work a bit simpler, something they recognize and have to think *less* about from day one. This is not how you get Visicalc, or cars, or refrigerators, or ipods or TiVOs. Each of these changes fundamentally the paradigm of the work to be done and the only way to get to those is by looking waaaaay down-level at what you're doing and how that figures in your life. You have to entirely redefine the problem at a very low level. It means not saying "how do we add all those numbers fast and keep track of them" but "what do we need to do with the numbers", forget about getting the ice to market faster, take the ice out of the equation. Look past programming a VCR to tape your favorite show at a particular time and channel and make a machine do the work of tracking the show, taping whenever it's on and wherever, and taping everything that has the person you watch it for whenever *she* is on a talk show rerun at 3:45 AM, the computer world is going to the network and going wireless, why spend time, energy and money putting connection buses on the computer? This kind of thinking means that instead of figuring out how many cars would be using the freeway exits per minute (incidentally, they came up with 1) so that you can avoid accidents, you decide not to have the entry ramps and exit ramps cross, so that the first problem disappears. In many ways, Interaction Design can be said to be an ongoing decision regarding what problems to look at so that we solve the right problems. This is never going to be something you'll find out in a focus group, because even if a participant were to say "Why solve that problem in the first place? Why not solve this underlying problem, instead?" You've already decided what your product is, and it's very unlikely that you'll do more than dismiss that questioner as a crank. So the question is: what are you trying to do? Build a better mousetrap or do away with house mice? Katie At 6:05 PM +0000 3/27/08, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >I'm in a quandary. >But, I keep digging up these quotes with monotonous regularity: > >a) "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have >said, 'a faster horse" - Henry Ford > >b) "We don't ask consumers what they want. They don't know. Instead we >apply our brain power to what they need, and will want, and make sure we're >there, ready" - Akio Morita, founder of Sony > >c) "It sounds logical to ask customers what they want and then give it >to them. But they rarely wind up getting what they really want that way" - >Steve Jobs > >d) "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of >times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them" - Steve >Jobs (again) > > > >So should I stop talking about focus groups? Is the old method of ask and >listen not applicable - particularly when designing stuff that's 'future >proof' and therefore impossible to assess with the users of the future - or >should we seek out new methods? Some have suggested trawling user >communities, eavesdropping on online dialogue to perform a gap analysis . >but is the next iPod or Flickr going to come out of a conversation on a >Facebook wall. It just seems so vague. Of course, myStarbucksidea (flawed as >it is from an Ix point of view) is an attempt to localise the dialogue but >will the ultimate output of this just be a 'faster horse'? > > > >For us in the IxD arena when we're trying to create something unique and >something innovative we press ahead with the development of prototypes and >visuals that may reflect an interface and design that doesn't reflect where >our users are today and, because they've not seen the insight we might have >done, simply don't get why they'd need it. A case in point: a piece of work >I've been involved with presented the idea that banking customers could tag >transactions in their account - customers didn't get it: "why would I do >that" . but we know from Mint [3], Wesabe [4] and others that people do use >this feature. The problem being that the client has heard too many users in >testing being dismissive about the idea and therefore increasingly thinks >it's a waste of time. Granted, we could have fleshed out the prototype with >'why would I do this' type content and is this the failing here or simply >that users don't always know best? > > > >Your learned opinions are sought. > >John. > > > >[1] http://www.dellideastorm.com/ > >[2] http://www.mystarbucksidea.com <http://www.mystarbucksidea.com/> > > >[3] http://www.mint.com <http://www.mint.com/> > >[4] http://www.wesabe.com <http://www.wesabe.com/> > >________________________________________________________________ >Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! >To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe >List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines >List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help -- ---------------- Katie Albers [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... 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