What is the difference between a focus group and a usability study? Why would you do one or the other or both?
Usability Study
A usability study gives you the experience of an individual. It tells you if a person visits your website with a specific question in mind, can they answer it? With a usability study, you will ask someone who is not familiar with your website to find answers to questions like:
- If your user wants to apply to the program, can figure out how?
- If your user needs your phone number, can they find it?
- If your user wants to refer a patient, can they find out how?
A usability study will tell you if what you want to make available to your users is actually available to them.
Focus Group
A focus group gives you much more general information, and will include people’s thoughts and feelings about your website and the content on it. If you do this in-house, you would generally act as a moderator, invite people who know your site well, and ask them to give you feedback in a group session. You will find out answers to questions like:
- What is your overall impression of my website?
- How often do you visit it?
- What is missing/difficult to find/not working on my website?
- What is useful /helpful/working well on my website?
- If you could change two things, what would they be?
- What are you looking for most often when you come to my website? Do you find it?
Focus Groups can be run by an external organization (there are some locally—just do a google search), or you can ask the people you know use your website to sit down in a meeting for an hour and give you some feedback.
Both types of feedback are incredibly useful when managing a website. If you are thinking about making some improvements to your site, and wondering where to go next, either one of these can provide you with invaluable answers and direction.