In class Focus Group: behavioural design 🧠

Session Planning and Intended Facilitation:
The session was designed around a slide deck I constructed titled Tarawen Corfield UXR Mini Deadline 5 Presentation.pptx. Because a focus group requires a supportive environment to elicit raw, unvarnished opinions, my planning focused heavily on establishing an explicit "Safe Space" right from the introductory slide. The framework established five core structural ground rules to manage group dynamics:

• No Wrong Answers: Positioning the space as an open exploration of personal lived experiences and subjective opinions.

• Respectful Disagreement: Explicitly validating interpersonal tension and conflicting viewpoints as highly useful research insights rather than disruptions.

• Privacy and Confidentiality: Ensuring that all raw comments remained anonymous and were bound strictly within the active session.

• Equal Voice: Reminding participants that every individual's baseline input holds equal weight, discouraging stronger personalities from dominating.

Role Players and Adaptations:

Our session was originally planned as a discussion among our small class of four students and our lecturer. However, on the day of the live online session, one student was unable to attend at all, and shortly after introducing the topic, another student unexpectedly dropped off the call due to connectivity issues.

Therefore:

• Facilitator / Moderator: Tarawen Corfield 

• Primary Participant: Fellow student

• Active Observer / Co-Participant: UXR Lecturer

This left the focus group standing at 2 active conversational partners.

Successes and Insights Discovered:

Despite the small participant pool, the session was quite successful.

For instance, when prompted about individual habits, the primary participant mentioned a productivity app she uses to limit screen time. She explained that the app features an empathetic "knitting bean" character who knits himself clothing while the user stays off their phone. If the user picks up their phone, the character abruptly stops his project and becomes visibly sad. This was a great insight into empathy-driven design. It showed that triggering a user's emotions, like making them feel guilty, is a highly effective way to stop automatic, unhealthy routines.

Challenges, Criticisms, and Final Reflection:

The primary challenge of the session was the number of participants, with only one student participant actively responding, it was impossible to cross-examine viewpoints, create peer-to-peer debates, or observe organic group polarsation, the hallmarks of an ideal focus group.

Additionally, during the debrief, my lecturer provided feedback regarding question phrasing, noting: "With some of your questions, just make sure to phrase them in a way that people can't answer just like yes or no. It's good to ask like how or why something is the way it is". I explained that I had intentionally made sub-prompts directly into the presentation slides so that if a participant gave a yes or no response, the sub-prompt would nudge them to elaborate on the underlying "why".

Ultimately, given the unavoidable challenges of a small class, the session went well.