Usability Tests vs. Focus Groups

If you’re new to UX, like me, it’s easy to mix up usability testing and focus groups. After all, both involve talking to real people, both generate insights, and both sound like something you’d do to “get user feedback”.

But here’s the truth: they serve totally different purposes, and if you use one when you actually need the other, you’ll end up answering the wrong questions.

Focus groups: opinions and feelings

A focus group brings a handful of people (usually 5-10) into a room to talk. You might ask them about their experiences with a product, their preferences, or how they feel about an idea or a brand.

The goal here isn’t to test your design, but to understand attitudes. Focus groups are great early on, when you’re trying to figure out what people care about, how they currently solve a problem, or whether your concept even makes sense to them.

Think of it as researching the “why” behind your users before you’ve built anything.

Usability tests: actions and behaviour

Usability tests, on the other hand, are all about watching people, one at a time, as they try to complete tasks with your design. That might be a live website, a prototype, or even paper sketches.

Instead of asking “What do you think of this?”, you ask “Can you figure out how to do this?”

The magic happens in the moments when users hesitate, get lost, or say, “Wait, what am I supposed to click?” That’s where you uncover friction, the small details that make the difference between a smooth experience and a frustrating one.

When to use each

• Focus groups are for before you design, when you’re exploring what to build and what people want.
• Usability tests are for during and after you design, when you’re checking if what you built actually works.

Both are valuable, but they answer different questions: Focus groups tell you if you’re building the right thing, Usability tests tell you if you built it the right way.

Key takeaway

Don’t fall into the trap of treating focus groups as usability tests. Listening to people talk about what they might do is not the same as watching them actually do it.

As Steve Krug puts it in his book Don’t Make Me Think, the real insight comes not from opinions, but from observing behaviour.

You say “potato”, I say “focus group”.

The article originally appeared on Substack.

Featured image courtesy: UX Indonesia.

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