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Do you want to generate ideas or validate them?

Contrary to popular belief, great ideas don’t just appear in a flash of light. Great ideas are based on something that someone has experienced or learned, and then validated to make sure that they’re really as great as we think they are.

Generative research can give you insights into your users that will help you come up with better ideas that are more likely to be valid because they’re based on something other than a hunch. A generative study is anything that might give you new ideas for features or products. It gives you insights into your product or user in a way that helps you come up with a hypothesis.

Evaluative research, on the other hand, is a method of finding out whether something is valid, like a design concept, marketing copy, a prototype, or a hypothesis. With evaluative research, you’ve already come up with a hypothesis or idea or even a product, and you’re testing it to see what’s right or wrong about it.

Let me give you a quick example. Back in 1998, Pets.com thought that a lot of people desperately wanted to buy pet food on the Internet. This was a hypothesis. As it turned out, 300 million dollars later, this was an invalid hypothesis. In fact, at that point in time, not enough people wanted to buy pet food from the Internet to make it a going concern. Had they validated their original hypothesis earlier, several venture capitalists would have saved 300 million dollars, but I wouldn’t have a commemorative sock puppet, so I feel like the whole thing was probably worth it (Figure 3.4