It is often difficult for practising interaction designers to engage with real end-users because of the competing economic pressures on projects. This case study illustrates an approach to managing stakeholder input in two-hour focus groups, where the participants adopt the perspective of an end-user to see the project ‘through their eyes only’. It concludes with an evaluation of the approach in terms of the experiences of the research participants and its merits in terms of project delivery and outcomes. The method is found to be most useful in multi-stakeholder projects and provides a rich design brief with clear, agreed, user-centred design goals.