Remote focus groups

Why use remote focus groups?

There are many advantages to using remote focus groups, including:

• Cost: remote focus groups are a cost-effective alternative to renting or maintaining interviewing facilities for in-person meetings
• Representative of real-world situations: participants engage in more natural environments, like their homes, which removes some of the uncertainty and shyness that focus group participants can experience
• More diverse demographics: without the restriction of local audiences and a global reach via the internet, you can zero in on your target market and be certain that you’ll get the number of test participants you need

Who benefits from remote focus groups?

Marketing teams have always relied heavily on focus groups to gather insights about brand and company impressions, as well as explore possible product and feature ideas.

Engineers, product managers, designers, and other development stakeholders also benefit from remote focus groups, especially if they’re in the early stages of developing a new product. 

Ethnographies and interviews, as well as focus groups, can be conducted during the development stages to accomplish many goals, including:

• Pitching an idea and gathering initial impressions of that idea
• Mining for users’ expectations of a new product
• Reviewing any initial wireframes or mockups

What can you use focus groups for?

• Brainstorming: remote focus groups are great for ideas that still need some cooking—participants can brainstorm ideas and pose hypothetical concerns
• Needs discovery: getting current users to talk at a high level about their experiences can be an excellent way to mine for future research ideas
• Synthesizing data: verify trends you see in data from other types of tests, such as diary or longitudinal studies