Online Focus Groups on CMNTY - Focus Solution Update June 2020
Back in April we released Focus, an Online Focus Group Solution created to help market researchers overcome the challenges of not being able to do face-to-face during the COVID-19 crisis. Your response has been amazing and we’ve continued improving the solution based on your feedback. Here’s an overview of what is new since its initial release.
General Improvements
User Interface Improvements
To start, we’ve greatly improved the design of Focus itself. With clear labels, it’s now more obvious what every button does. This helps participants find their way around Focus quicker.
New Moderation Tools
You can now mute an attendee by hovering over their name within the participant list, and selecting “mute” from the dropdown menu. This is useful when certain attendees experience background noise that becomes a distraction to the other attendees. It’s now also possible to remove an attendee from the meeting entirely if that’s necessary for whatever reason. They will not be able to return to the session.
Participant Chat
We’ve added text based chat to the interface, allowing for a real-time chat session between all attendees. This is useful when you want to communicate with attendees without disturbing a live conversation. And of course the same goes for the other attendees.
Backroom Chat
A separate chatroom was added that allows text chat between moderators and observers. This is useful when your client or internal stakeholder is present as an observer and wants to make a suggestion on subjects to discuss.
Interactive Whiteboard
Sometimes it’s just easier to draw something instead of trying to explain it in words. That’s why we’ve added WhiteBoard, an interactive whiteboard that attendees can use to draw something on a blank canvas. What is being drawn will be visible to all attendees in the meeting, and people can respond to it by drawing onto it or next to it in a different color.
Analyzing Focus Group Sessions in Pulse
CMNTY Pulse, our central insights and moderation hub, is where you can analyze your online focus group session after it has taken place. To help you analyze your sessions quicker and find insights faster, we’ve added a few improvements to it.
- Auto-transcription has been improved; We’ve expanded the list of supported languages which 17 new languages & dialects. For instance, you can now choose between French (European) and Canadian French.
- Direct video playback; We’ve made sure that the video can be directly played within Pulse without the need to download.
- Jump to timestamps; With the timestamps in front of transcriptions, you can quickly jump to a certain time which allows you to read and view the conversation at the same time.
- Recording indicator; While browsing the list of sessions, it’s now clearer which meetings were recorded.
- Observer indicator; It’s now clearer which people were observers within the meeting itself.
What’s Next?
Chat and Whiteboard Improvements
Because so many of you are using Focus, we are already working on a next set of improvements. For example, we will continue to expand the new chat and WhiteBoard features.
Session Reminders
We will also make sure that people are reminded about upcoming Focus meetings and it will be possible to download only the audio of a meeting instead of the whole video.
Raising Hands and Quick Polls
We will also expand Focus with the option to raise hands, which is ideal if people would like to say something or if you want to do a quick poll where people raise their hands to indicate they agree. Speaking of polls, we will also implement an actual poll within Focus which will be very much like the current poll widget.
Available Now
Those things you’ll be seeing soon, but the rest of the improvements are already available in your CMNTY Platform. If you have any questions or suggestions, please reach out to our team here.