Generative research vs Evaluative research: definition, methods and uses

After we understood the importance of generative research, let us dive into the ways we can generate information on the users:

• Discovery interview

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, this is a preliminary phase involving the problem space research, framing the problems and gathering initial direction on the next steps. 

Discovery interviews are important during the exploration phase of the product. It helps you to gather insights about user requirements and experiences while also shedding a light on how their lives can be related to your product. 

You can conduct discovery interviews using some rather open questions, which has a scope of gaining information out of your product square. But how? Let us see the steps:

Step 1: Stakeholder inputs– Get this phase to understand what the product owner wants with the development. Their requirements and their ideas of marketing are taken into consideration. By framing a proper questionnaire, getting these answers won’t be tough. 

Step 2: Convert inputs into research questions– Take the most appropriate interview questions and process them to have useful research questions. These will help you understand the vital areas of development.

Step 3: User interview– In this phase, it is time for the users to express their experience with the products. Be ready to face their problems and try to dissolve them based on their expectations. The questions can be simple ones aimed at understanding the user perspective of the product. 

• Netnography

Ethnography is when a researcher observes a group of subjects in their natural environment. And Nethnography is nothing but just virtual ethnography. And this transformation happened due to the computerization of everything. While the mains focus remains the same, that is Observation, nethnography has digital observation of the users. Looking out for users’ social media platforms, watching the discussion under a blog post or anywhere, where there is an interaction between users. 

With that being said, let us understand how to perform nethnography:

Step 1: Defining the process– Take time to understand your topic of interest. Read through surveys, researches, forums. Create an image of what and how you want to deal with the study and how you are going to progress further with it. 

Step 2: Select a community– now that you know what you are looking for, get on the internet and OBSERVE. Dive deep into all sorts of threads, discussions, forums, interviews, etc. get to know all these sources and come up with your target groups. 

Step 3: Qualitative data gathering and analysis– Now based on your target audience, generate research questions. “How, what, when, where, why” this set of questions will help you get to the bottom of it and understand what your target audience is dealing with in their everyday life. 

Step 4: Get insights– After you have all the required data, the next comes is gathering insights from it. Look for patterns and habits regarding user behaviour and code them. 

Step 5: Generate solution– Now for the last step, get to the solution. After completely processing your data, and gathering all the necessary insights from it, it is now time to apply those to your product innovation. 

• Photo collage

A photo collage in generative research refers to asking the users to pick words, pictures, quotes from newspapers, books, magazines, etc. These are going to represent their feelings, emotions and thoughts regarding a product, person, environment or anything for that matter. After gathering the above cut-outs, users are then asked to arrange those in a collage manner. Pretty self-explanatory right?

Well, the main reason behind this out-of-the-box technique is that it is FUN. And what’s a better way to keep customers engaged right. Beyond that, it is said to be more expressive of user opinions and feelings. But how to carry out this process? Let’s see:

Step 1: The component gathering– Here, you are supposed to gather as many components as possible. They can be pictures, words, emoji faces, colours, shapes. These components can represent emotions, feelings, locations, etc. The point is to have everything a user might want to express themselves. Or the other way is to ask them to bring their toolkit. 

Step 2: Creating collage and observation– Once the necessary components are ready, ask users to make a collage depending on the topic and their views about it. Give them 20-30 minutes to put their minds to it. Meanwhile, observe the process. 

Step 3: Interview– This will be a short exercise regarding eh collage. Ask users to explain their design and why did they choose the specific components.