1. Wants and Needs Analysis (a type of focus group meeting)
Alfred Kobsa
University of California, Irvine

2. Brainstorming session
A wants and needs analysis is a special kind of focus group in which participants brainstorm about product features and services they would like to see.
Storming questions:
What activities would you like to perform with this product?
What information would you like to get from this site?
How would you like to accomplish a particular task?
Problems:
People don’t always know what they really would like/need
People often cannot predict how much they would like/use a specific feature.
What people say they do or will do is often different from what they actually do or will do.

3. Rules for Moderator Have personality Ask questions Stay focused
Avoid behaving like a participant
Keep the activity moving
Keep the participants motivated/encouraged
No critiquing
Everyone should participate
No one should dominate

4. Rules for Brainstorming Process
During the session
Tell participants to imagine an ideal world / ideal product (“nothing is impossible”)
Tell participants that no comment is “wrong”
Disallow designing
Comments get written down (possibly by a trained scribe)
Comments are posted to be seen by all
(Probe answers to find the “real” need/opinion)
During or after the session (and after several different sessions)
Duplicates become eliminated
Answers become grouped/hierarchically structured
Answers become ranked
Statistics are made across different sessions