From the course: UX Deep Dive: Foundational Research

What is foundational research and why does it matter?

From the course: UX Deep Dive: Foundational Research

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What is foundational research and why does it matter?

- Most of us know that user experience is made up of a wide range of disciplines, with a major delineation between those who focus more on creation and design and those that focus more on research. Within research, there are even more distinctions, and one of the most important to understand is that between the kind of research that evaluates solutions and the kind of research that helps us understand the users, context, and possibilities. That first type of research is usually referred to as evaluative research, and is often thought of as a UX researcher's bread and butter. Have solution, assess how well it does. This is usually covered by things like usability tests, tree tests, that kind of thing. And no doubt it's incredibly important to be able to assess solutions, whether they're existing products, competitor solutions, or something you've just come up with. It's just that you need to know more than just evaluation techniques to be a truly impactful UX researcher. That's where foundational research comes in. We use foundational research to understand contexts and people, generate ideas, to find meaning and definition out of unknown spaces. You might also hear this research be called exploratory, generative, or discovery research. They're all typically used pretty interchangeably, but for the rest of the course, I'll use the term foundational. To remember, you can think of this kind of work as that that helps us set the foundation for what we're going to build, for whom, and why. Deeply understanding people and their contexts helps you see what could be better in their lives, or how you could build or provide something of value, which leads you to opportunities. This is the sort of research that leads us to aha moments about new features or services to offer, ways to change your current offerings or pivot to a different model altogether. The shift is to think about people and what they need, rather than just thinking about your product. Ultimately, understanding people's lives will help you craft your product, but you'll be able to paint a much fuller picture. Foundational research helps you understand what you should be building and for whom, and evaluative research helps you understand how well those solutions are doing. Evaluative research is more tactical, typically guiding individual design decisions, whereas foundational research is more strategic, and helps guide overall product or direction decisions. You might use foundational research to learn about the types of users you serve or should serve, understand new services, offerings, or features to provide, help you decide what things not to work on, prioritize currently understood work, or any other kind of adaption your teams might need to make. Of course, there isn't always a cut and dry delineation between evaluative and foundational research. For instance, you might conduct a series of moderated usability studies, where users lead you through their individual processes, where you both assess how well the tools they have are working for them and learn about their context and the gaps in their current experience. You don't need to think of a clear distinction between the two categories, and only use specific methods for one type of an effort or another. But there are typically different research objectives and scopes for the two kinds of research. Thinking through your goals and considering these different sorts of efforts will help you frame your research activities and craft the right kind of study to answer your biggest open questions. If you need a refresher on refining your research goal and choosing appropriate methods, or any other research logistics, you can check out my Research Fundamentals course.

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