User Survey vs Focus Group - Which is Better?

It is important to elicit feedback from library customers to determine the degree of satisfaction. No service organization can please all its users all of the time, but they must constantly strive to improve. We must build on our strengths and work on weaknesses. However, we must know where there is dissatisfaction before we know how to make adjustments.

It is beyond the scope of this blog entry to discuss in detail focus groups and user surveys. I refer my readers to these sites:

• Focus Group
• User Survey

The difficulty in arranging focus groups is that students are very reluctant to come even when offered compensation and a free lunch. We are asking them to give up an hour of their time. Perhaps they feel that what they say would not change a situation. We can also attribute this to apathy. Even a successful focus group only has about 10 participants. Such a small sample can never give representative feedback. I feel that a focus group works best when evaluating a product rather than a service.

A user survey is not perfect, but it at least reaches more people. It should be designed to take no longer than 10 minutes to complete. It should be more than just multiple choice questions and allow users to make comments. As an inducement to participate, an award (gift certificate to the bookstore) should be offered to one person in a lottery.