Writing in/of/through the ether

focus group on sunday

For those of you who weren't able to make it on Sunday, here's what went down at the focus group:

We had three attendees: Mark Charney (chair of the English department)
Rick Goodstein (chair of the Theater department)
Mike (student currently applying for internship at the O'Neill)

Class members present were: Reyne, Ashley, Shannon, Shawn, Lindsey, Lauren, & Dr. Fishman

We started out with some preliminary questions in which we asked for descriptive terms for the O'Neill, what the O'Neill is actually like, what they would expect to find on the O'Neill website, what they would specifically go to the site to find, etc.

Then we asked the participants to look around the current website and give some feedback. They, like us, had lots of confusion in trying to navigate the site. We also gave them some specific tasks from the list that Lucia made, and they had lots of trouble finding what they needed then as well.

Finally, we asked the participants to group post-its of the information currently on the site and add any information that seemed to be missing.

The participants we had gave us some really great feedback and suggestions, and we learned that focus groups, like most everything else, often don't run exactly according to plan, but with flexibility, you can gain more information than you would have expected.

I have posted a text representation of the card sort grouping, and we will give more details to you on what was actually suggested after the tape recordings are transcribed and the notes are compiled.

Lauren

posted by Anonymous @ 3:52 PM