At InterQ, we’re in the business of doing quantitative and qualitative research. Qual-what? Essentially, we conduct focus groups, interview customers and potential customers, and even do a little UX work that includes customer journey mapping and biometrics. Basically, we’re in the business of people-to-people research. We work with companies to refine their products prior to launch, and help existing companies improve their marketing, brands and products.
An especially common tool we use is the focus group; recently, we had a project that required an upfront questionnaire prior to assembling the focus groups. There are a lot of various survey companies out there and tools we could use, but we’re a big fan of Wufoo and their super easy-to-use forms, so we turned to them for our project.
The pre-focus group survey homework project
Our aim for this project was to use focus groups to help our client enhance both the content, flow, and navigation of their website. However, we had kind of a sticky issue: We needed to ensure before the focus group started, all of the participants (64 of them, composed of 8 groups of 8) were familiar with the site. How were we supposed to do this?
The solution we came up with was to create a short survey that would be sent to the focus group participants prior to the actual groups. By asking the participants to answer specific questions about the website, we’d be certain that they were familiar with the content before we began the actual focus group process and asked their feedback about the website. It was kind of like a homework assignment, but we tried to make it fun and not seem like homework.
Here at InterQ we like to think we’re pretty rad at doing qualitative research, but we don’t pretend to make the same claim when it comes to writing code. Thankfully, Wufoo has pre-made templates that we could choose from for our homework exercise, in other words, no code writing necessary. The Web Site Visitor Survey was perfect for our purposes.
Putting it all together: Analyzing the results
Before conducting the focus groups, we needed to keep track of who had filled out the homework assignment, and Wufoo’s Reporting Manager feature made this super handy. Their feature also enabled us to learn a bit more about each participant by reading through their responses.
In the Report Manager, we could look through both detailed accounts of the answers to the survey questions, and information on where the participants lived by region, what kinds of software they used to fill it out, and how many responses we were getting by day. Wufoo made it easy to export the data to a spreadsheet, helping to share and analyze amongst our team.
So, so easy.
Wufoo’s Form Gallery, Drag ‘n Drop functionality, and Report features greatly aided our project management logistics. With them, we were able to develop our focus group homework assignment surveys in a short period of time, direct participants to the survey through a link, and analyze the results with just a few clicks. By setting up the survey process through Wufoo, we ensured that all 64 of our focus group participants visited the website we were discussing for the project, thus maximizing our productivity and resulting in fruitful discussion once group discussions commenced. Wufoo facilitated our work every step of the way, and ultimately, allowed us to yield transformative insights for our client.
