Qualitative Audience Research

To find out what would be the best colour scheme and structure for my magazine front cover I conducted a focus group with members of my audience and I showed them various different templates of my magazine as possibilities for the final product. I asked them questions regarding the designs to get valuable qualitative information from them about the different templates.

Seen below are the templates that I created and showed to my focus group.

As you can see I tried to create various different colour schemes and structures within these templates.

The first question I asked of my focus group was "Which colour scheme do you prefer? and why?".

The overall agreement among the majority was that the first colour scheme red and black was the best of the 4. One of the participants remarked "I like the way the two colours contrast and also because it looks like the NME" this tells me that if I were too use this colour scheme then I would be sharing that of the NME and many other music magazines as red and black seems to be the most widely used among music magazines. So by using this template I would be following conventions.

The second question I asked of my focus group was "Which layout do you think is the best? why?"

There were a lot of different opinions on this question amongst my focus group as some preferred different aspects of all the designs while others like certain ones in particular. One of the participants said that "I like the way the figure complements the page on that template (the 4th one down) but I like the way that the text is placed  on this template (the 1st template shown above)." So I think I will have to take varying different aspects that were well liked by my focus group and combine them all together to make a design that my audience will really like.

The third question I asked of my focus group was pointing towards what I should include in my magazine so I asked them "What do you expect from a magazine?".

The responses consisted of the participants listing things that they would expect to see in a music magazine. These included "interesting articles, high quality images, free things, latest music news" among other things. So I will try and include everything that was mentioned by the focus group.

So after taking all of the feedback into account I think the final magazine product will look similar to the top template but will have elements of all 3 implemented into it.