The evaluate experience was my most favorite component of the project! I enjoyed participating in a focus group. This was the first focus group I had ever watched, participated in or moderated. We invited 8 of my grandfather’s friends from his retirement community to come to his house for our focus group section. This focus group was vital not only for our prototype, but for our concept because we gained information about personal struggles, complaints, desires and unmet needs of those currently living in their community. At the top of their list was the lack of community feeling. We asked them to rate their sense of community 1-10 and the average answer came out to be a 6. Right away we knew that we had something of value. This is the type of feedback we wanted to receive. This feedback was not bias either because we had not told them our prototype until later in the focus group session.
I feel like our group had allot of diversity. We had both men and women, age ranged from 57-86 and some were married or widowed. Participants influence each other through their presence and their reactions to what other people say. Since our focus group was so diverse, most people did not have the same views and experiences. Having so many different viewpoints was an advantage. We were able to see that the older generation 75+ would have a very limited use for this app and would prefer to stay in their current ways. This just confirmed that our target market of those just entering a retirement community is correct. We got many good ideas from this focus group that would make our app even better; Adding an emergency contact to the emergency button, eliminating double booking, combining calendars for couples and linking email, contacts and calendar to the phone.
Being the moderator was comfortable position for me. I reviewed the insight the book, Qualitive Research Methods, had for moderating. The book supported our class discussion where a good moderator is one that creates a discussion where he/she speaks very little. In class we used to 20/80 analogy. Our team had to think of ourselves as learners rather than teachers. We wanted to get insight from them. In order to do that we had to listen. It was difficult not to try and “sell” our idea. I need to improve on my managerial skills. I felt we got off topic and I should have done a better job of addressing that. I knew the structure of the focus group guide but used judgement about when to deviate from it. After our debrief we had everyone fill out a feedback grid. The feedback grid allowed members in our focus to group to organize, categorized and prioritize their thoughts. This allowed us to see what they considered to be the most important aspects.