Please note, this project required me to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). This greatly limits my ability to freely share information here. If you want to read the full case study, know more about my process, or the outcomes regarding any of my other projects, feel free to reach out!

Background

I like to view focus groups as a way of gaining clarity around potential hypotheses. After our first full year of gathering user data and developing internal assumptions on how fans use and perceive our product, this felt like the perfect time to reevaluate our target audiences’ beliefs and opinions. I proposed these next-gen fan focus groups as an opportunity to

• Update our understanding of users’ motivations and challenges

• Identify high priority next steps on our roadmap

• Clarify hypotheses during this early stage of our product development. 

Role

• Planned, designed and facilitate four 90 minute virtual focus groups following the funnel technique, open-ended and broad at the beginning and progressively build detail and specificity with concepts as the conversation progresses

• Recruit and screen 33 participants that are representative of our target audience

• Produced affinity diagram deliverable to quickly organize and share team-wide observations and ideas

Project wins 

1. Integrated ideas and suggestions from focus group participants onto product roadmap and began design and development of app redesign centered around personalized sports timeline.

2. Following the focus group I designed an intuitive credits based viewing system for the app, resulting in a 240% increase in moments viewed per week(yoy) based on price feedback gained from this research study. 

3. Overhauled paid marketing strategy to include language and insights gathered from gen-z participant audience. 

Reflections

While I did notice a lot of groupthink within the study, pairing surveys with focus groups was a powerful combo of triangulation as we worked to limit bias. Obviously focus groups tell you what people say, not what they do so it's a bit lacking compared to usability testing however I felt confident in the data we gathered regarding what users actually want from a next-gen live sports app. After conducting four 90 minute sessions, we left with ample amounts of user observation data and insights which led to affinity diagramming. 

Although I've conducted 100+ 1:1 user interviews and facilitated multiple design sprints, this was my first opportunity moderating a virtual focus group. During the group session, my main areas of focus were keeping the discussion on track without interrupting the flow of ideas and of course ensuring that all group members contribute to the discussion. I also worked to keep in mind that focus groups can easily produce faulty data because participants might believe they want one feature/capability when they need another. I worked to minimize this problem by being explicit when displaying and describing concrete examples of how the Buzzer app functions. 

Planning, let alone moderating a successful focus group is an art itself. Props to anyone else who has conducted one. While focus groups in ux research are often frowned upon, if you need to clarify your research hypotheses and gather data regarding how people discuss a potential problem/product I’d say it’s worth a shot.