Ideas

This should sit as a little icon on the desktop or in the browser and flash when a focus group is ready to go. A little pop-up message tells you the nature of the focus group, what is being paid, what the topic is and the approximate length of time the group will take. Catch people in real-time while they are surfing the web.

I would definately download this kind of alert system and participate in focus groups while I was surfing the web. If this kind of thing popped up while I was surfing the web, I would definately think about joining an online focus group if i had the time and it could earn a few bucks or royalty points. +1

I think this is a really interesting and great idea. I'd like to go through the financial model to see what websites are willing to pay for this information and therefore see how much we could pay people to give the feedback. I think these margins would be important to know if this could be a success. I assume this would be found during the market test unless you already have an idea of these numbers.

I would suggest keeping this as simple as possible for people to provide quality feedback to the website. If it's too technical then you cause the same problem you're trying to solve (ie. only technical people are giving feedback).

I think this is a great idea. Web designers are always looking for feedback and usability information and I haven't heard of leveraging this type of study in an online community.

I'm not sure how this works with people at work. I don't think you'd want to market it that way, but I can see where a lot of people bored at work would do something like this.

Also, what's oDesk?

This would be great, and would improve the state of the industry in general. Gotta love that.

@techguy - oDesk is an app that caters torwards companies that are using offshore labor to develop stuff. It's a little "big brotherish" in that it gives you a snapshot of their desktop and a pic from their webcam every ten minutes so at the end of the day you can view what they were working on the whole time. It bundles other tools that are similar to the GForge suite (what powers Norseforge). I only brought that up as it could make a model for how the feedback is captured - essentially you'd want both their physical reactions to using the site (ie. scratching their head looking confused) paired with video screencapture of them navigating the site. Those two elements together would give you all you need to run a decentralized, remote focus group and gather valuable feedback.

@psychsplash - the icon in the systray or the mac widget is a great idea- puts a realtime flow to it rather than queueing them up on a web app somewhere. I like it.

sean