The purpose of the focus groups was to gain patients’ and carers’ insight into their experiences of communication difficulties when looking after themselves or someone they care for with a chronic disease, and their preferences of verbal or written information, preference of presentation formats of the information, and giving feedback on the prototypes to determine specific types of information that they would like to see included in the prototype. However, the objective of the focus groups was to elicit information not just to get comment on information placed before participants. Thus there was a considerable amount of open discussion before any prototypes were displayed.