People are honest in surveys. They describe the routine they believe they have. Watch the same people at the sink on a Tuesday night and the routine looks different: more rinsing, more products, more time, and a pan left to soak until morning. The distance between those two pictures is where many product ideas come from.
The method
A researcher joins a participant on a live video call for 60 to 90 minutes, at the time the routine really happens. The participant carries or props up their phone and walks through the job and the spaces around it: the kitchen, the pantry, under the sink, the laundry room. Short follow-up tasks over the next few days, such as a photo each night or a 60 second video, fill in what one visit cannot.
The question it answers
What really happens, and what are people working around? Ethnography finds needs people cannot name because they solved them long ago with a workaround. It also checks survey answers against real behavior, which tells you which survey numbers to trust.
How we run it
We recruit 10 to 16 households for the mix that matters, such as household size, dishwasher or none, and the brands they use. Each completes a short survey before the visit, so we can compare what they said with what we see. The visit follows a light guide: a short tour, the real task from start to finish, a storage tour with every product taken out, then the part of the job they like least. We log every workaround as a still from the video, and every visit is transcribed and coded.
What you get
A roster with a profile of each home, a comparison of what people said and what they did, a log of workarounds with photos, themes with the opportunity each one points to, and a highlight reel of short clips with time stamps back to the full visits.
Where it goes wrong
Visits booked at a convenient hour show a tidied routine, so we visit when the job really happens. A researcher who asks too much turns an observation into an interview. Twelve homes show what is happening and why, and teams sometimes treat them as a measure of how often. And a reel cut without care can let one memorable household speak for everyone, which is why every clip carries its theme and links back to the full visit.
The sample below follows a fictional dish care brand into 12 homes during weeknight dinner cleanup. Click the tabs to move from the roster to said vs did, the workaround log, the themes and the highlight reel. Every brand, household and number is invented.
Illustrative only. All brands, products, households and figures are fictional. Open the sample full screen.