An empathy trek is a market research method where researchers or business teams step directly into their customers’ environments – whether at home, in-store, on the job, or elsewhere. Unlike surveys or interviews conducted at a distance, empathy treks allow you to observe real customer behavior and context in-the-moment. They are a type of ethnographic research designed to uncover deeper layers of user motivation, behavior, and emotion.

How empathy treks work in practice

During an empathy trek, trained researchers (often joined by client stakeholders) follow consumers through real-life routines. For example, observing someone shop for groceries, prepare dinner at home, or use a financial app in their day-to-day life. They watch quietly, ask thoughtful in-context questions, and take detailed notes. By being physically present, researchers can pick up on situational cues, body language, frustrations, and workarounds the consumer may not even mention – or be fully aware of.

Key features of empathy treks:

• Real-world setting: Observing customers in the environments where they naturally engage with a product, brand, or process
• Behavior-first: Understanding what people actually do, not just what they say they do
• Participatory approach: Can include client teams shadowing sessions to foster empathy and alignment
• Emotional insight: Identifies subtle frustrations, desires, habits, and mental models

For businesses, the value of an empathy trek lies in its clarity. You may think you know how a person uses your product or service, but seeing it happen in real-time often reveals surprisingly different stories. It’s one of the best qualitative research methods companies use to uncover unmet needs or process gaps that aren’t obvious from data dashboards.

Whether used to guide product innovation, improve customer experience, or sharpen brand messaging, empathy treks bring a human layer to customer data collection that is hard to replicate at scale.

Used on their own, empathy treks provide rich contextual understanding. But when paired with complementary tools like digital diaries, the depth of insight increases dramatically – allowing you to capture both external behavior and internal emotion. We’ll explore that method next.

A digital diary is a modern market research tool that allows participants to record observations, thoughts, and feelings over time using their own smartphones or digital devices. These entries – often in the form of videos, photos, text, or audio – happen in context, meaning participants share personal reflections as they’re living their experiences, not afterward in a formal interview setting.

Digital diaries are a type of self-reported ethnographic research, offering a window into the lived experiences of your customer over days or weeks. They are especially useful for tracking journeys, routines, or decision-making processes that unfold over time – like shopping for new furniture, managing a health condition, or seeking out a new service provider.

How do researchers use digital diaries?

In most digital diary studies, participants are assigned simple tasks (for example, “Record your thoughts each time you search for new shoes over the next 5 days”). They submit short entries via an app or secure platform, often triggered by specific events or activities. Researchers then analyze these entries for recurring themes, emotional triggers, barriers, and unspoken needs.

Digital diaries help reveal:

• Emotional responses: What people felt in real time – frustration, surprise, satisfaction – not just how they summarize it later
• Contextual data: Where someone was, who they were with, and what they were doing when key decisions took place
• User mindset: How priorities or emotions shift over time during longer journeys or processes
• Private experiences: What people would rather document digitally than share face-to-face

Digital diaries provide authentic, intimate content from the customer’s perspective. By capturing their voice on their terms, these tools allow for a more nuanced understanding of customer emotions and behavior. This can be particularly valuable when exploring topics that are routine, personal, or emotionally complex.

In combination with empathy treks, digital diaries add continuity to the research experience: they can be used before, during, or after in-person visits to round out the story. Where empathy treks capture contextual and behavioral moments in real-time, digital diaries offer inner reflections across time. Together, they create a 360-view of the consumer journey and provide a richer foundation for user behavior research.

Empathy treks and digital diaries are powerful market research methods on their own—but when used together, their impact deepens significantly. Each tool offers a unique lens into customer behavior, and pairing them enables researchers to capture a fuller, more emotional picture of the consumer experience.

Think of it like this: empathy treks give researchers a boots-on-the-ground perspective, allowing for real-world observation of user behavior in natural settings. On the other hand, digital diaries empower participants to document feelings and actions over time, offering context and continuity beyond a single moment or visit.

Where Digital Diaries Support Empathy Treks

Using digital diaries before an empathy trek prepares researchers with initial customer observations. Participants often record daily behaviors, frustrations, or needs through short videos, photos, or notes—all of which provide clues about what matters most to them. This pre-work helps researchers arrive at empathy treks with informed hypotheses and sharper questions.

Strengthening Emotional Understanding

Once the in-person observation (the empathy trek) is complete, researchers often walk away with powerful impressions: body language, tone of voice, environment—all of which are meaningful but momentary. Digital diaries extend that understanding by showing what happens next. Participants continue documenting their thoughts or decisions over hours or days, helping researchers see emotional shifts or behavioral patterns that emerge over time.

Complementary, Not Redundant

Rather than choosing empathy trek vs digital diary, combining them makes the outcome stronger. You're diversifying your qualitative research techniques while enhancing validity across time and context.

• Empathy treks: Deliver immersive, observational, ethnographic research from field visits
• Digital diaries: Offer remote, ongoing self-reporting to track user behaviors and customer emotions

Together, these tools enable more complete customer data collection, helping businesses understand both what people do and how they feel.

At its core, this pairing reflects the future of user behavior research – flexible, empathetic, and anchored in real human experience.

One of the biggest benefits of combining empathy treks and digital diaries is using each method at the right moment in the research journey. By structuring participant activities before and after field visits, teams can gather richer, more insightful data without overwhelming respondents or researchers.

Pre-Work with Digital Diaries Before an Empathy Trek

Before conducting a field visit, participants may be asked to complete a short digital diary exercise over several days. This helps researchers get to know the person’s habits, preferences, routines, and emotional responses around a topic—before meeting them face-to-face.

Examples of effective pre-work assignments include:

• Photo journals: Participants photograph moments related to a product or service (e.g., meals at home, commutes, morning routines).
• Video reflections: Daily video entries describing frustrations, motivations, or expectations in their own words.
• Task-based prompts: Completing specific actions and reflecting on how those experiences felt (e.g., using a new feature or comparing brands).

Post-Trek Follow-Up via Digital Diary Techniques

After an empathy trek, the experience doesn’t end. Continued digital entries over the next few days or weeks help track how emotions or behaviors evolve. This gives researchers insight into the impact of external variables that weren’t visible during the direct observation.

Some tailored follow-up approaches include:

Progress logs: Participants continue using a product or service and track changes in usage or sentiment.

Touchpoint diaries: Logging each time they interact with a brand or product and noting their satisfaction or obstacles.

“Yesterday vs. Today” videos: Brief comparative updates reflecting any shifts in awareness, habits, or satisfaction.

From Moments to Holistic Stories

These techniques, when used in tandem, weave together isolated moments into broader patterns. They also improve recall and emotional accuracy, giving researchers better access to subtleties that define customer decisions, needs, and beliefs. It’s an ideal example of how smart research tools for customer emotion tracking can move a business past assumptions into evidence-backed understanding.

Knowing when to use a combination of empathy treks and digital diaries depends on the complexity of your research goals and how deeply you need to understand customer motivations. This approach is especially powerful when you're exploring behaviors that don’t happen in a single moment or location, or when your business question requires emotional depth as well as behavioral accuracy.

Use This Approach When You Need To:

1. Understand the full context around a customer need
Looking to uncover what drives a user’s choices or frustrations before and after engaging with your product? This method combines observational research (empathy treks) with longitudinal tracking (digital diaries), helping you see how context influences emotion and action.

2. Design or improve a customer experience journey
From awareness through long-term engagement, digital diaries and empathy treks together uncover pain points and potential improvements across the user journey by observing behavior in real-life scenarios.

3. Develop empathy for niche or hard-to-reach segments
Whether researching caregivers, remote workers, or early adopters, combining research techniques brings you into their world without overburdening them. Diaries add flexibility; treks add depth. Together, they allow for more inclusive ethnographic research methods.

4. Identify disconnects between stated and observed behavior
Often, what customers say doesn’t match what they do. An empathy trek may reveal different choices than a participant discusses in their diary logs—and vice versa. This reveals blind spots or subconscious decisions that single-method studies might miss.

Ideal Industries and Use Cases

This blend is highly relevant across industries, from CPG and healthcare to financial services and tech. Common use cases include:

• New product development or packaging validation
• User journey mapping or UX research
• Well-being and wellness tracking
• Brand perception or loyalty studies

Ultimately, this is one of the best qualitative research methods of 2025 and beyond—not because either component is new, but because their integration allows brands to see the full picture: what customers think, feel, and do in real-world situations over time.