Generative vs. Evaluative Research: What's the Difference and Why Do We Need Each? | UserTesting Blog

<aside> 💡 What needs exist for a solution to address? What's the problem space? What's the status of each touchpoint in a person's experience of a specific situation we're interested in?

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What is generative research?

The goal of generative research is to look to the world around you to find opportunities for solutions and innovation.
These solutions could be new products or experiences or they could be an update or improvement to an existing one.
In order to identify new and innovative solutions, you must define the problem you are trying to solve. This requires you to truly understand people’s live, environments, behaviors, attitudes/opinions, and perceptions.
Indi Young, a user experience consultant and a founding partner at Adaptive Path, believes you must “feather your nest” with generative research. This includes rich data about your target audience and their needs/goals before defining the problem and crafting a solution.
When conducting generative research, the most important thing to do is to keep an open mind: you don’t actually know what problem you are trying to solve yet.
Generative research is done to generate information about the users and ways in which they operate.
It involves learning about who the users are, what they do, how they do it, why they do what they do in a particular way, what frustrates them, what makes them happy, in what contexts they take an action, etc.
Generative research helps define the problem under consideration. The bulk of generative research is done at the beginning of a project, but it can continue at a smaller scale throughout the project if the problem requires further clarification.

Why is it valuable?

Quite frankly, if you don’t conduct generative research, you could create something that no one actually needs or uses!
Take a look at this list of failed products. Many failed because they were addressing a (sometimes fictitious) problem the creators didn’t truly understand.
You don’t develop the best solution by doing lots of evaluative research and refining your design. You develop the best solution by properly identifying the problem with generative research.