Focus Group

A focus group is when you get a collection of people together to discuss about something in particular. The purpose of a focus group is to get feedback from a neutral point of view. In preparation to the focus group we had to get the final cut of the video ready, the existing website and the existing digipack.
When it came to running the focus group we were (4 of us) were in a classroom with a media class in the year below us with their teacher and we asked them questions on our products that we have created. When asking the questions we were advised to ask them in a different way to get the best and most effective response to help us improve, these questions were
What do you think about the digipak?
What do you think this band is like?
What words you pick to describe this band based on the digipak?
The reason why we are supposed to asking questions like this compared to asking what people like about the website or the digipack is because in this case if they don't like anything then they will say so, we can then learn from the feedback and look on improving the products. Whereas if we just ask what the focus group like about the products we wont find out if there is anything they don't like. We recorded our findings from the focus group with a voice recorder, this was effective because not only does it let us look back on the focus group and see the exact feedback we got from the group, but we managed to do it discretely because its not like we had a big camera in the individuals faces which would likely effect what the individual was going to say. We had a phone on the table which hardly anyone noticed.

The key findings we got from the focus group were

• Too much space on the home page 
• The products on the store page needed to be added- we showed them the products that would be added and they said that the products needed to be neater  
• The lion needed to be clearer 
• The digi pack and the website needed to be linked together better 

Website before focus group

After the focus group

As you can see from the video before the focus group compared to the video of the website after the focus group we have changed a few bits around mainly because of the feedback we got in the focus group.
For example:
That empty space on the home page has now gone
The products have been added
And the lion picture is clearer
The focus group really helped us to develop the website and digi pack from the advice given to us.

update on the website

I spoke to Phil on Friday about the website and he was basically telling me that we are not gonna go very far with the website if we are just making it up on the spot, we should look at other websites for inspiration. This really annoyed me at first as we spent quite a lot of time on the website, but then i realised that we really hadn't gone very far with it at all so i took Phil's advice and started to look at some other websites for inspiration.

Looking at these two websites is what has given me the inspiration. I think the simple look is the best for us. 

feed back on website

From the feedback to the video, the main area that appeared to come up the most was the background photo for the pages, this is still a working progress for us however. But we are looking for a abstract photo, so we do know what we are looking for which is good. Mainly the advice that we got was to make the gallery slide on the home page fit the home page better and put it below the top half of the page so that people dont see the top of the gallery when opening up onto the home page which looks scruffy.