Would You Rather: A Focus Group Method for Eliciting and Discussing Formative Design Insights with Children

Would you rather go 1000 days without the Internet or five days where anyone can read your mind? We present “Would You Rather” (WYR), a technique for generating formative design insights (inspired by the conversational game of the same name) that combines design provocations with forced-choice scaffolding. Here, we describe the components of a WYR session, which include scenario generation, voting, and group discussion. As children disproportionately benefit from scaffolding during the co-design process, we also report on an evaluation of the technique with 16 children, conducted across seven sessions and spanning the course of one year. We find that WYR fulfills recommendations for focus groups (e.g. eliciting mental models and values, producing focused yet animated discussion) and leverages playfulness, humor, structure, and forced choice to overcome known common challenges of designing with children.