Holding a focus group
A focus group is the conversational counterpart to a survey. You moderate, a handful of personas from one audience answer in their own words, they can hear each other, and every reply is grounded in reviews you can open.
Setting one up
Start at /app/focus-groups/new, or from an audience page.
- Pick the audience. Its personas load with their weights.
- Choose the room. Tick the personas you want. Up to eight; the more people in the room, the longer and more expensive every turn. Four is a sensible default.
- Write the guide (below). At least one prompt is required. The first one opens the session.
- Set the two switches. Reply length, short or normal. And whether the participants hear each other, which is on by default; turning it off gives you independent answers with no conversation between them.
Sessions belong to your workspace and stay readable after they close.
The guide
The guide is your list of prompts, each tagged as an opening, a probe, a concept or a close. You work down it during the session and the room marks off what has been asked. You are never locked into it: you can type any question at any point.
Generate with AI
Give a topic and an audience and userken drafts a guide in one model call. It is not writing from nothing: it first pulls up to a dozen real reviews about that topic from that audience and drafts the prompts from them, so the questions use language the audience actually uses. You get a title and up to six prompts, all editable before you start.
The room
Ask a question and every persona in the room answers in parallel, in its own voice, seeing the recent transcript. Replies arrive as they land; the page polls the database rather than holding a connection open, so you can close the tab, come back and carry on.
- Ask the room, and everyone answers.
- Direct a question at one persona by name, and only that persona answers.
- One question at a time. While the room is still answering, the next question is refused rather than queued.
- Close the session when you are done. A closed session takes no more questions and keeps its transcript.
Each turn costs one credit, whether it goes to the room or to one person. On the Free plan the number of turns in a session is capped.
Grounding
Every persona is retrieved for separately, on every turn: the question is embedded, and the five reviews closest to it from that persona's own app and star band are put in front of it before it answers. If the band is too narrow to return anything, it is relaxed rather than left empty.
The reply shows how many reviews are behind it. Click through and the panel shows the first three in full: the app, the stars, the platform, the date and the text. This is the check that a persona is reporting rather than improvising.
Summaries
Ask for a summary at any point and one model call over the transcript returns key findings, where the room agreed, where it disagreed, the quotes worth keeping and recommendations. It is stored on the session, so it is there when you come back.
Exports
/app/focus-groups/{id}/export downloads the session as Markdown: the title, the audience, the model, who was in the room with each persona's share of the audience, the full transcript with a note of how many reviews grounded each reply, and the summary if one has been generated. It pastes into a document or a ticket without reformatting.
There is also a copy-paste focus group prompt for an audience, in the app and through the get_focus_group_prompt tool: the personas with their weights and instructions to ground every answer using userken's tools. Use it when you want to run the panel inside Claude rather than in the room.