Focus groups to support the industrial/product designer: a review based on current literature and designers’ feedback

Manual handling of highway kerbs—focus group findings

“…Focus groups can be linked with other techniques to support the discussion, triangulate data, or add insight though a variety of additional activities (Bruseberg and McDonagh-Philp 2002). It was intended as part of the overall research into the manual handling of kerbs to use the focus groups to support individual interviews, site observations and equipment assessments.…”

User Involvement and Entrepreneurial Action

“…By launching these methods and experimenting with them in companies, academics and practitioners aim to promote and enhance userinvolvement practice, and raise awareness among designers. Surveys and reviews (Bruseberg & McDonagh-Philp, 2002;Cassim, 2005;Goodman et al, 2006;Hanna, Ayers, Ridnour, & Gordon, 1995;Kujala, 2003) indicate that the available methods are often underutilized. Whether or not this results from a lack of awareness, however, is an open question.…”

“…Surveys, workshops, and tests-perhaps even field observations of the user context-are conducted, and developers are expected to make use of all the new information. Empirical studies have shown that users' contributions may be rejected by design teams as irrelevant, incomprehensible, or too time-consuming to deal with (Bruseberg & McDonagh-Philp, 2002;Holmström, 2004;Kujala, 2003). This is not a special limitation of design teams: Research on organizational behavior, organizational decisionmaking, and knowledge management show that there are limitations to organizational attention and sensemaking capacity (Brunsson, 1985;Cohen & Levinthal, 1990;Starbuck, 1983;Vopel, 2003;Weick, 1995).…”

“…In order to ensure the transfer of relevant knowledge to product development, complete product development teams were present in the focus group sessions we organized (cf. Bruseberg & McDonagh-Philp, 2002). In summary, the companies received a short-term intervention by knowledgeable consumers, and we conducted a short-term follow-up of how the companies made use of this intervention in their innovation process.…”

Exploring usability

“…These reports tend to provide abstracted conclusions in which a lot of the richness of the data is lost. Moreover, research results are often formulated for a research audience instead of a design audience (Bruseberg and Deana 2002;Sleeswijk Visser, van der Lugt et al 2007). They therefore make it difficult to connect usability evaluations to design, which Hornbaek (2010) identified as being one of the dogmas prevailing in research on usability evaluation methods.…”