Imagine you’re a designer on a team starting the design process for a new product in the travel space. You have decided to focus on building a platform for young adults.

As we mentioned in the last exercise, you’ll often find yourself designing a product for users who aren’t just like you. Even if you’re designing to solve a problem you’ve experienced, it’s useful to examine the broader landscape and explore how others think about it.

For example, some of us might be young adults right now. Others were young adults at some point in our lives, or maybe some of us are parents of young adults. From any of those perspectives, we might assume that we already understand what young adults would seek in a travel product and what challenges they face when traveling. But before you embark on designing a solution, you need to get to know your actual users and figure out what their real motivations and pain points are.

Generative user research, also known as exploratory, discovery, or foundational research, occurs during the earlier stages of product development and focuses on discovering the motivations and pain points experienced by users. These types of user research work best during the early stages of product development, when you’re trying to get to know your user base.

Some types of generative user research include:

• Interviews: A researcher asks each participant a series of questions about a topic.
• Surveys: A broad range of users are sent the same set of questions to collect broad insights and trends about a given topic or market.
• Diary studies: Longitudinal, or longer-term, qualitative data is collected from participants by asking them to complete entries in a diary which may include a series of prompts.
• Ethnography and field studies: These methods observe behavior in a natural setting and often occur over time, offering more long-term or continuous insight into participant behavior.

In contrast to generative user research, evaluative user research, such as user testing, evaluates or assesses an existing design or prototype so the design team can improve and iterate.