Recruiting for Focus Groups at VMworld 2006
November 07, 2006 by Glenn R. Cochran
My team successfully finished the recruiting effort for four focus groups we are running on-site here at VMworld 2006. Today we met many nice people that all really love VMware's products and a few more that had never heard of user research or a focus group. We took the time to explain our goals of better understanding them and how they use the product and most people then decided to make time to participate. The whole team is looking forward to the actual focus groups themselves. If you've signed up, we'll see you there!
User Research Is Key!
I truly believe that user research is key to the success of any product and it's design as well as it's overall success from a usability standpoint. Without enough detail about the users themselves how could anyone design anything? Working with the folks on my team at VMware we regularly conduct usability studies, on-line surveys, focus groups, as well as in context interviews.VMworld 2006 provides us direct access to users of VMware's products and all in one place to boot. With this year's attendance toping 7,000 people we have direct access to many of our users we otherwise would not. Users of our products are visiting from around the world and we get to speak with them face-to-face and let them know aboutg what we do for a living. How great is that?