(energetic guitar music)
- Good design and communication
are important to every business.
And equally important,
is knowing how to work with designers
to achieve those goals.
One important thing to understand
is that focus groups are terrible.
Great work is not achieved by committee or by consensus,
great work is achieved by someone with a strong vision
or an original idea and the leadership skills
necessary to convince others
to take that creative journey with them.
That journey should not pass through
the sterile one-way-mirrored rooms that house focus groups.
It's not that the people in those groups
don't take the responsibility seriously,
being asked and paid to weigh in
on the aesthetic qualities of anything
is a pretty big deal to most people.
So they want to do good, but they have no real way
of knowing what good means in this context.
Group settings like these
often lead people to mistake criticism for intelligence.
A guy who says, hey, that's cool, I really like it,
may not seem as smart
as those with something negative to say.
So critical comments rule the room,
even absurd things like that shade of red is weird,
and it can be difficult to ignore negative feedback.
It's an act of bravery
to continue to like that weird shade of red
after the group has spoken
or to say, how can a shade of red even be weird?
Focus groups rate only what the people in them
are already comfortable with,
or what we already understand as being good.
But good design should be distinct
and specific to a particular client's needs.
(electronic guitar strums)