Focus groups allow participants to voice their viewpoints, hear what others have to say, and bounce ideas and thoughts off each other. Researchers can also gather a broader range of data as the questions for participants are not set in stone. This made it ideal for our group's study of peoples knowledge and thoughts on current feedback from car infotainment systems. The goal of our focus group was to identify what participants knew about the current feedback in cars and how effective they felt these types of feedback were.
To ensure that we were prepared for our focus group, we created a to-do list for the call to ensure we asked the core questions on the topic we were investigating. The to-do list also included a reminder to gain the participant's permission to record the session. Microsoft Teams was used for the focus group as it allowed us to connect with our participants and record the meeting remotely. When the group was ready, we began by explaining our area of research and key terms. Defining terms ensured that the participants were aware of the topics we were discussing. As the moderator, I asked the questions and cleared up any confusion.
To-do List
When the session was completed, we exported the meeting transcript, which would be used to analyse our data. The ability to export the transcript was essential as we could engage with our participants with the peace of mind that we did not need to take notes as the session was recorded. When amending the transcript, we ensured that no participants name was included as we informed the participants that their participation was anonymous.
Amended Transcript
When analysing the data, we identified some interesting points that participants brought up. For example, we noted that the participants spoke about the many uses for car infotainment systems, from maps to music. From this observation, we could conclude that these systems display large amounts of information that could be distracting. These findings would assist us in the ideation and design of our prototype.
Overall, I think the method effectively gathered useful qualitative data, but observation would have been a more suitable option for the topic at hand. As we were exploring the effectiveness of feedback from car infotainment systems, we could have observed drivers as they interacted with current systems and interviewed them. This would have allowed us to gather unbiased data as the driver would be interacting as they would in a real-world environment instead of answering questions to which they could be applying their own bias. The main flaw of our method was that all of our participants were passengers. Granted, we gained some compelling insights from a passengers perspective, but a drivers perspective would have been more appropriate.
After undertaking this design method, I can now confidently plan and moderate a focus group and use tools like Microsoft Teams to collect and analyse data.