Evaluating information visualization applications with focus groups: the CourseVis experience

This paper reports our experience of evaluating an application that uses visualization approaches to support instructors in Web based distance education. The evaluation took place in three stages: a focus group, an experimental study, and a semi-structured interview. In this paper we focus our attention on the focus group, and we will show how this evaluation approach can be very effective in uncovering unexpected problems that cannot be identified with analytic evaluations or controlled experiments.