Online focus groups for the development of a usability evaluation tool: Lessons learned

Focus group discussions are a well-established method for acquiring insights from experts in different fields. This method requires special amendments when it is used for the development of different tools in the healthcare domain. The objective of this paper is to present the lessons learned from online focus group sessions held for the development of a heuristic usability evaluation tool for mobile health applications.

Two online focus group sessions were conducted with the participation of ten medical informatics experts to develop the tool. The sessions were recorded using screen recording software. The comments provided by the experts were categorized, and the lessons learned from these sessions were identified and reported.

The experiences achieved from the online focus group sessions were categorized into the following ten lessons: 1) Engage the participants fully in online session discussions; 2) Use an appropriate and interesting format; 3) Select an appropriate number of people for online sessions; 4) Invite people having the closest expertise related to the research topic; 5) Employ a technical support technician in addition to the coordinator; 6) Prevent the emergence of a new topic in sessions; 7) Arrange the required hardware and software facilities before the session; 8) Prepare the content in an appropriate language; 9) Use online tools to schedule sessions; 10) Use screen-recording software.

This paper reports the lessons learned from holding online focus group sessions in the process of developing a heuristic usability evaluation tool for mobile health applications. Although these lessons were learned in a study focusing on the development of a usability tool, they can also be used to improve the results of focus group sessions in other fields of medical informatics.