If you’re wondering whether to conduct a focus group or a workshop to better understand your customers, this blog is a must-read. Most practitioners in UX have been asked by clients to conduct focus groups at some point. We always recommend conducting a workshop instead — a thoughtfully facilitated workshop rooted in the principles of human-centered design (HCD). Otherwise, you could end up with biased answers that don’t reflect customers’ honest views.
Below, we’ll compare traditional focus groups to HCD-based workshops and explain why workshops are the smarter choice. Come along!
What is a focus group?
A focus group is a small group interview or guided discussion about a particular product, service, or message, used to gather feedback on customers’ experiences. Most frequently used in market research, focus groups generally include a moderator and six or more participants who come together in one room to discuss a specific subject and give opinions, feedback, and feelings.
What is a workshop?
A workshop is a collaborative, participatory research activity that typically divides participants into teams and has them work together on creative exercises to solve a problem, often used in UX and service design! Participants create deliverables, like customer journey maps or lists of suggested design solutions for existing challenges.
There are many different types of workshops that can be leveraged to better understand a customer experience, including rapid prototyping workshops and co-design workshops (a.k.a “design jams”). You can conduct workshops remotely or in-person. Like with paid focus groups, participants are often offered an incentive.
Difference Between a Workshop and a Focus Group
A focus group is an open group discussion used for gathering feedback, while a workshop involves creative tasks that leverage your customers’ perspectives in a more engaged way. Workshops yield more authentic responses, while focus groups will often confirm what a business already knows or wants to hear.
There are six key differences between a focus group vs a workshop:
- Purpose: Feedback vs creative brainstorming
- Activity: Discussion only vs collaboration
- Facilitation: Asking questions vs prompting activities
- Participant role: Active vs collaborative
- Duration: 1-2 hours vs half-day or more
- Outcome: List of opinions vs solution-focused data
Focus groups are often used for surface-level market research, which can help with marketing but doesn’t help in informing design improvements for products and services. (For more on this topic, see our blog about customer surveys that compare market research and UX research.)
If the description of workshops sounds like what you are doing in your focus groups, then you might actually be holding a workshop without realizing it!
Workshop vs Focus Group: Which One Wins?
Between workshops and focus groups, workshops are hands-down the recommended method for gathering unbiased feedback and identifying the underlying motivations and needs of users and customers. Many science-backed studies on focus groups and ethics have shown that focus groups provide skewed and biased results that aren’t a reliable basis for decision-making when it comes to CX, UX or service design.
Companies use focus groups because they’re effective for answering questions quickly… BUT those questions are usually framed in a way that invites bias and/or asks for confirmation of an idea that a company has already come up with. For example: “What are people’s feelings about gluten being used in snacks for children?”
In these cases, the answer that aligns with a company’s pre-existing assumptions usually wins, particularly if money has already been spent on those assumptions. We agree with this article about why focus groups don’t work — focus groups often serve just to “fulfill the psychological needs of sellers.”
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Why Focus Groups Are “Bad”
We get asked this often, and while we’d never suggest that genuine curiosity about the customer’s perspective is bad, focus groups are not a recommended research method. They encourage many issues that skew resulting insights.
Below are six effects of focus groups that are particularly dangerous:
1. Groupthink
Groupthink happens when a group of individuals set aside personal beliefs and opinions in order to reach consensus, and as Psychology Today points out, this often involves the individuals making “irrational and non-optimal decisions” as a group.
When a focus group moderator asks a question, one person immediately gives what sounds like a good answer, and the rest of the group simply agrees without adding their own input. The moderator may try to push the discussion forward, but all group members just mirror what the first person said. This might come from a need to conform or to not “rock the boat.”
2. Introversion
In a focus group setting, an introverted participant may not feel comfortable interrupting a group of people to give their thoughts, despite the fact that they, too, have valuable opinions to add to the discussion. They’d be much less likely to share, or they might have their input pushed aside or ignored.
3. A tendency to lie
Similar to groupthink, focus group participants may flat-out lie about a subject because they don’t want to deviate from the opinions of the group. A participant might also give untrue answers simply because they don’t really care about the topic (or they might be in the session just to collect their incentive).
4. Anchoring
Anchoring happens when a participant tends to be highly influenced by the first pieces of information they learn about something, which influences their subsequent decision-making.
If one confident focus group participant speaks up first and provides a plausible fact or anecdote to back up their opinion, the other participants might “anchor” their own thoughts and feelings in that fact or story, whether it’s true to their viewpoint or not.
5. False consensus effect
In a focus group setting, one person might give loud opinions that they assume are held by the other group members as well (particularly if participants are from the same demographic), and that assumption might be taken on by the researchers.
To truly understand our customers’ motivations, you want to avoid the creation and misinterpretation of false consensus.
6. Loss of Focus
With more people and opinions in a room, a conversation is more likely to derail and go off topic. A gifted moderator can help steer the conversation back, but not all focus groups are led by seasoned moderators with this ability.
Why workshops are more effective
Workshops, particularly co-design workshops, guard against the bias that focus groups tend to propagate. Here are some key reasons why:
- In-depth prompts: Workshop participants are asked to solve problems. This requires deeper reflection and weeds out surface-level answers.
- Time/work required: People are much less likely to commit to a longer, task-based session on a topic they don’t care about or plan to lie about.
- Group subdivisions: Participant groups are typically split into smaller teams, resulting in multiple unique takes on a problem.
- Skilled facilitators: Facilitating workshops can be more complex, which means a facilitation specialist will usually be engaged to do the work. (We recommend going through a UX staffing agency to find yours.)
When workshops are most effective
Co-design workshops are best conducted when you’ve already gathered some initial data to identify what pain points and challenges your users/customers are experiencing. Then, you can bring participants together to ideate solutions to specific issues that they think would help. (If you need some research method recommendations for your initial research, check out the next section in this blog.)
Other research methods to replace focus groups
A human-centered approach and a balance of design research methods are more likely than focus groups to give your company the insights it needs to move products and services forward in an effective (and hopefully, money-making!) way.
We recommend using a mix of methods to gather the most accurate, valuable insights. This might include a qualitative survey and some in-depth interviews, with a workshop at the end to validate your findings. You might also conduct some observations with a smaller group of customers as they use your product or service.
One-on-one research activities are best for your initial exploratory phase of research because there’s nowhere for shy participants to hide and no other person’s opinions to mirror. These activities also enable researchers to weigh responses evenly after the fact. If one interview participant has a negative experience with a service, but the majority of others reported positive experiences, these findings can be weighed in relation to each other.
While we’ve highlighted all the reasons why you should not use focus groups, we still commend anyone who’s doing some form of user or customer research! You’re already ahead of the game when so few organizations are reaching out to get feedback. Thanks for reading! If you’re interested, you can check out the types of workshops we facilitate.
Research-related sources we like….
- Psychology Today explores how groupthink works
- Study in the Quality & Quantity journal about the ethical challenges of focus groups
- This article about focus groups from Vox
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