Subjective user preferences, attitudes and experiences can be probed in-depth. Focus groups can be superior to individual interviews for obtaining perceptions and beliefs because the group environment may allow greater anonymity and therefore help individuals to disclose more freely. A drive for social desirability or a tendency to impress the interviewer may be diminished by the presence of peers. Also, the group format itself is more active and may stimulate greater participation. Another advantage is that each participant is not required to answer every question or respond to every comment yielding more genuine and substantial responses.
Focus groups provide the opportunity to elicit a range of opinions.
The data available are often richer and fuller than the data available from an individual interview. Focus groups can be demanding in terms of time and number of users needed to receive approximately representative results. Email and computer conferencing may be used as a cheap way of approximating the focus group approach without the expense of gathering users in one place. Electronic mail systems over wide area networks provide a cheap, timely and available method for conducting an informal survey of users' views. The questions were brief and the sample size was small but that did not diminish its usefulness.