I love participating as a subject in user studies, focus groups and interviews. This affords me the opportunity to witness social science from an entirely new perspective. Last nite, i had the opportunity to be in a focus group on blogging. The focus group consisted of 5 (technologically savvy) subjects plus the moderator and it took place over AIM. I’ve participated in interviews over AIM and found them incessantly irritating, so i was quite curious to see what would happen in a focus group.

We were all assigned random logins. This meant that no one took the time to personalize them and thus, there were a lot of little AIM men talking. Because i was using iChat, i couldn’t differentiate the AIM men and i found this consistently confusing. [Update: smarter people taught me how to switch to see names because of this post.] Nothing was known of the participants, although aspects of their interests and values emerged through conversation. Of course, the problem was that i couldn’t differentiate the speakers so i’d learn something about one AIM man and not know how to connect it back to that AIM man when the s/he spoke again. Very confusing. Thus, i tried not to model gender or other attributes in my head and just stick to text, line by line. This made it feel very un-focus group-y.

The questions came as fast as they did in the interview and so i found myself scrolling fast trying to keep up. I also found that i did not like the text i was producing. Instead of trying to flesh out nuance, i answered every question as briefly as possible, with lots of information left to interpolation. Still, we were producing so much data that it was hard to keep up. Yet, what was that data worth? I don’t think that i answered any question well or properly contextualized anything. Still, i rambled on with stories and little anecdotes, hoping those would help.

To a certain degree, we bounced things off each other, but group gestures of affirmation and confusion were completely missing. Most everyone was focused on getting their text out as fast as possible.

The result was pretty frustrating. Of course, i think that my experience on that AIM chat mimics one of my subject’s descriptions of blogging better than blogging itself:

“You’re basically standing on a soapbox and reading something out loud only with a blog it feels like there’s a big community square and everyone’s got a soapbox and they’re about the same height and everyone’s reading at the same time.”