Usability: Affordable Focus Groups
Author of this post: Mike Madaio | About Blog Authors »
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Hi Mike,
I really want to do focus groups for my sites, but I’m just getting my business off the ground and my clients aren’t exactly high-paying. How can I test out my site cheap and still get useful info out of it? Hope you can help!
Rob
Well Rob, the first thing is that you probably don’t want to be doing focus groups, which typically involve a small group of people sitting around answering questions and giving you opinions. Instead, you’ll want to do usability tests, which consists of observing one person using a website or application and learning from their behavior. Instead of relying on someone’s opinion in a focus group, this methodology simulates actual user interaction and highlights where users get stuck, succeed, etc.
All you really need for a usability test is a quiet room, a computer and 3-5 willing participants (test with one user at a time). Though you may learn more about your product with more users, most experts agree that the ROI for this testing method starts to drop after about 5 users. If you have drastically different user groups (librarians and library patrons, for example), of course, you’ll want to test with 3-5 users.
If you can recruit friends and family (assuming they match the user group you are targeting), using this methodology will cost you nothing at all. If you have access to users of the product you are designing but need to entice them to participate with an honorarium (usually $50-100 per user), it’ll cost something, but typically not much in the grand scheme of things.
There are certainly additional costs that can improve usability testing, such as professional user recruitment, lab/facility rental, screen capture software (such as TechSmith’s Morae), etc., but the good news is that you can start small and build out this aspect of your business at a very low cost.
Hope this helped!
Mike
