⏰ Do Now — Start Here
Think about the last time you asked a friend "does this look good?" Why is that a hard question for them to actually answer honestly?
🎯 Today's Big Question
- How do we find out whether a design actually works for the audience it was made for, instead of just guessing?
📈 By the End of Today, You Will Be Able To
- Explain the difference between a critique (peers judging craft) and a focus group (target audience reacting as real users).
- Write 4-5 unbiased focus-group questions that avoid leading the audience toward a "right" answer.
- Run a short focus group on a finished piece from an earlier Client Project and record specific, usable notes.
- Identify at least 2 concrete changes the focus-group feedback suggests, separate from anything a peer critique already caught.
🧰 What You'll Need
- A finished piece from an earlier Client Project (logo, ad campaign, or style guide)
- A written question guide (one per interviewer)
- Notecards or a shared doc for recording responses
📋 Your Plan for Today
Day 1: Writing Unbiased Questions
- Do Now (5 min, above): why is "does this look good?" a hard question to answer honestly? Mini-lesson (12 min): critique vs. focus group -- who's giving feedback and what they're qualified to judge; leading vs. neutral questions, with side-by-side examples ("Don't you love this?" vs. "What's the first thing you notice?").
- Guided practice (10 min): as a class, rewrite 2 leading questions into neutral ones.
- Independent work (13 min): write your own 4-5 question guide for a finished piece from an earlier project.
Day 2: Running the Focus Group
- Do Now (5 min): swap question guides with a partner and flag any question that still sounds leading.
- Focus group (25 min): in small groups, take turns being the "audience" reacting to a classmate's finished piece using the question guide, while the designer takes notes without defending or explaining their choices.
- Debrief (15 min): each designer identifies at least 2 concrete changes the feedback suggests that a peer critique hadn't already caught, and writes them down.
📚 Key Words
- Focus Group
- A small group of people from a design's actual target audience, gathered to react to it and give feedback -- different from a critique, where peers judge craft and technique.
- Leading Question
- A question worded so it nudges the answer toward what the asker wants to hear (e.g. "Don't you love this color?") -- the opposite of what a useful focus-group question should do.
- Usability
- How easily a real, untrained person can understand and use a design without extra explanation.
- Bias
- Letting a designer's own attachment to their work quietly steer the questions or the notes taken during feedback.
✅ What Your Finished Work Should Include
Question guide (checked for at least 4-5 neutral, non-leading questions) + written notes from the focus group + the 2 concrete changes identified, scored with a rubric.
Exit Ticket: What did a real audience notice about your design that you, as the person who made it, had completely missed?
📊 Before You Leave
Quick, anonymous class check-in -- takes less than a minute.
🎓 ACP Exam Prep
This lesson connects to the Photoshop Adobe Certified Professional exam: Domain 1: Working in the Design Industry
🔗 Want to Learn More?
🚀 The Extra Mile
Cross-Class Connection: This is literally the Scientific Method's "test your hypothesis" step, applied to design instead of a lab.
Career Connection: User testing is a named, required step in the UI/UX career page's roadmap.
Go further -- turn this into a portfolio piece:
- Run a real focus group (five or more people) on an actual design you've made, and document what you learned and changed. Start here: write your five specific questions and pick a design that's actually finished enough to react to before you recruit anyone.
- Design the actual testing materials (questions, rating scale, consent form) as a reusable template for future projects. Start here: build the consent form first — without it you can't legally run the rest of the session.