Ask someone how they chose their last appliance and you get a tidy story: they read some reviews, compared a few and picked the best one. The real path had dozens of small moments in it: a video at midnight, a box too tall for the counter, a meal at a friend's house. Most of them are gone from memory within a week. An experience diary catches them while they happen.
The method
Shoppers who are about to buy in your category keep a diary on their phone for two to three weeks. Every time something touches the decision, they log it: a photo or a short video, a line of text and two quick ratings, how sure they are and whether the moment pushed them toward or away from a product. The diary keeps going through purchase and the first uses at home, so you see whether the product lived up to the choice.
The question it answers
Where are buyers deciding, and is your brand there when they do? The diary shows which touchpoints matter at each stage, which moments move people toward a product or away from it, how long the path takes, and where your brand was missing while shortlists were forming.
How we run it
We recruit people who expect to buy soon and have not started shopping in earnest, with quotas for first-time and replacement buyers. Each entry takes under a minute in the app. A gentle reminder goes out on any day with no entry, and a researcher reads entries daily and follows up on anything unclear while it is still fresh. Every entry is tagged to a stage, a touchpoint and any brand it mentions, and the journey map is built from those tags.
What you get
A journey map built from real entries, with the share of people who used each touchpoint at each stage. A ranked list of the moments that moved people, with the change in confidence that followed. A brand view showing where you were seen, shortlisted and bought, and a library of every photo, video and entry.
Where it goes wrong
Recruit people who already know what they will buy, and there is no journey left to watch. Ask for too much in each entry, and people save moments for later and write them from memory, which defeats the purpose. Stop at the checkout, and you miss the first use, which shapes reviews and the next purchase. And a diary of 40 people shows where to look; a survey confirms how big each gap is.
The sample below follows 40 shoppers buying a countertop air fryer over three weeks, for a fictional brand that does well at the shelf and is missing earlier on. Click the tabs to move from the design to the journey map, the moments that moved people, the brand gaps and the diary entries. Every brand, shopper and number is invented.
Illustrative only. All brands, products, shoppers and figures are fictional. Open the sample full screen.