Fishbird

I’ve made this case a number of times, especially as I train people in how to incorporate games, including Innovation Games®, in a program of user research.

User experience professionals need to get clear about what’s wrong about focus groups, and what’s so attractive about them. The March (2013) BayCHI monthly program abstract ends with the words, “why you should never, ever hold a focus group.”  Now we’ve got a timely discussion.

Later this week, I’ll be adding additional information about what kinds of useful results you can expect to get from a focus group that uses activities (vs one that follows a script narrowly), how these newer kinds of focus groups are changing the face of civic engagement, what kinds of questions will get useful answers, and how to recruit people to provide meaningful answers.

User researchers know that it’s possible to analyze qualitative responses with quantitative methods, given enough responses.

Research methods are divided into various categories. One familiar distinction is the qualitative and quantitative. Sometimes we think of these categories as distinct types of research:  either-or. A research project collects qualitative data (e.g., an interview with questions that invite open-ended responses) or quantitative data (e.g., a survey with multiple-choice, true-false, or scalar responses). Or is it that the analysis uses qualitative methods (affinity diagrams) or quantitative methods (statistical packages)? (more…)