Focus Group

In order to gain feedback on my third front cover draft and first contents page draft, I conducted a focus group consisting of my target audience. This included 5 females and one male pictured below, whom are all aged between 16-17 years old. As my target audience is aimed at mainly females aged 16-21 years old, this offers a portion of my target audience. Despite this, from my research I have considered this age group as a whole, so I do not believe that the majority opinions from this selection will be overly different than those of 20-21 year olds per say.

The main aim of this focus group was to gather honest opinions about the front cover and contents page. Because of this, I aimed to not steer the conversation too much, allowing opinions and comments to come through. Below is the voice recording of the focus group paired with annotations referencing the areas which they are referring to:

To further summarise, the main points raised were:

• Professional looking masthead - especially integration of guitar
• Aesthetically pleasing colour scheme which carries well across both pages
• Well organised content aided by columns
• Price too small
• Contents page too monochrome - images in colour
• Integration of another colour - red from lips

Overall, I am pleased with this feedback from my target audience. The fact that subtle details - including the guitar masthead and refinement of colours in the house style - are popular both prove my primary research as well as justify the change of masthead design. The conventional style of the contents page also proved popular, with the group unanimously agreeing that the columns are organised and make it easy to find content.

As mentioned in the clip, the price was originally larger in the first draft, but after my personal critical evaluation of the front cover I felt that the price was too big, distracting away from the main cover line. The group seemed unsure if a change was necessary, but such a small element like this can always be revised, and perhaps increasing the size slightly may make this content easier to obtain.

The monochrome images was a deliberate choice as to aid the house style. I felt that the full colour images were too distracting against the quite sleek design, and I did not want to overcomplicate this. However, this was a concern raised in the focus group, so I shall experiment with changing the images to full colour or perhaps changing the main image of the cover page to monochrome to further the conventions.

The addition of another colour was also noted, with the red from the cover artist's lips a specific example. Personally, I feel that the unanimous response to the current colour scheme of teal/grey does not need to be added to, so I shall refrain from integrating another colour. However, I could always exploit the darker teal used for the editorial text into the title elements of the contents page.