Velmora, a fictional dish care brand, sells dishwasher pods and a hand dish liquid and wants to know where its next product should come from. A researcher joined 12 households on a live video call during their real weeknight dinner cleanup. Each participant propped up or carried a phone and walked through the sink, the dishwasher, the cabinet under the sink and anywhere else dishes ended up. Short follow-up tasks over the next five days filled in the nights we did not see.
Live visits
12
scheduled at each home's real cleanup time
Average visit
78 min
range 64 to 92 minutes
Video recorded
15.6 hrs
all visits, transcribed and coded
Follow-up tasks done
34 of 36
three tasks per household
Roster · click a household Observed
| Name | Household | Dishwasher | Main products | Products under sink | Visit |
|---|
First names are invented. Ages, homes and places are changed. Products under sink counts every dish product found, opened or not: 41 in all, 3.4 per home.
How a 78 minute visit runs
Before and after the visit
A week before each visit, every participant answered a short survey about how they clean up. Then we watched. The gap between the two is the reason to do ethnography at all: people describe the routine they believe they have. The largest gaps point straight at the opportunities.
What people said vs what we saw Observed
Share of households. Dishwasher questions use the 9 households that use one; the rest use all 12.
Cleanup time, minutes Observed
Timed from the first plate off the table to the last pan put away or left to soak. The longest was Keisha's two loads and a sink of pans. Every household underestimated. The hand-wash pile accounts for most of the gap.
The gap that matters most: pre-rinsing
3 of 9 said they rinse before loading. 8 of 9 did, most under running hot water, plate by plate. Asked why on camera, the answer was nearly always a version of "or it won't come clean." That is a belief about the detergent, and a detergent brand can answer it.
Every time a participant showed us something they had rigged, adapted or used in an unexpected way, the researcher captured a still from the video. Workarounds are unmet needs that people have already solved badly. Each is logged with what it is, why they do it and the theme it feeds. Images are described here.
Workaround photo log Observed
Workarounds by theme Observed
38 workarounds logged across 12 homes; 12 shown here. Each is counted once, under its main theme.
Where they were found
Five themes, each with the households where it showed up and the opportunity it points to. Twelve homes can show what is going on and why. They cannot size it, so each opportunity ends with the test that would.
Where to start
The pan pile,
then the rinse
The hand-wash pile is where cleanup time goes and where people improvise most. A pan product built for the overnight soak people already do is the clearest new-product lead. Pre-rinsing is the clearest message lead: 8 of 9 do it because they doubt the pod. Both go into a concept test with a few hundred dish care buyers next.
The highlight reel is the part people watch. Ten clips cut from 15.6 hours of video, each tied to a theme, with the time stamp in the original visit so anyone can go back to the full context. Click a clip to see its transcript.
Faces are blurred and names replaced in any version shared beyond the project team.
Reel at a glance
Clip list Illustrative