Concept testing was a nice change of pace for me. Instead of doing work and discussing it amongst group members, we could simply sit back and let others do the criticism for us (with a little guidance of course). The feedback was refreshing, coming from minds that were unbiased toward our ideas and not bogged down by the months of work that we have experienced leading up to this point. Unfortunately, I was out of town and unable to attend the final focus group conducted by my team; however, the practice session we conducted in class was perhaps equally as helpful, as it allowed us to identify our mistakes and create a better guide to elicit truly helpful feedback when the time came.
Several of the challenges we encountered during the practice session included:
- We wasted too much time organizing and distributing the prototypes to the group, and in doing so, prevented the participants from having a focused, clear introduction to our solution.
- We did not have a comprehensive explanation prepared for what our prototype did; we thought we did, but when the time came to explain, we found ourselves inserting additional information with every sentence to clear up the confusion on the part of the participants.
- We could not truly replicate the focus group scenario since we were limited on time. This meant our flow of dialogue was restricted to pure feedback instead of creating a space for general conversations about housing, which may have included key feedback for how to further hone the prototype.
By unearthing these problems early, we were hopefully able to have a much more effective dialogue among our focus group participants. I think it will be very interesting to review the results from the real focus group and compare them against the feedback we received from the group in class. I believe that the practice group had the natural advantage of understanding the process we had been through and the understanding of what the feedback was meant to be. Hopefully, the focus group could stand back even further from the project and offer even more insight to help us create a final product.