Introduction
What Is an Empathy Trek and Why Is Location Important?
An empathy trek is a form of qualitative research that allows researchers and business teams to observe and engage with real consumers in their natural environments. By spending time where life actually happens – such as inside a consumer’s home, alongside them as they shop, or while they move through their routines – researchers gather firsthand consumer insights that written responses or lab environments might miss.
Unlike traditional methods that rely on what people say they do, empathy treks reveal what people actually do. And that’s where location becomes crucial. The setting helps uncover unconscious behaviors, subtle routines, and unspoken needs – especially in ethnographic research where context is everything.
Why Location Fuels Better Insights
In market research, the phrase “context is king” rings especially true during observational research in real-life settings. Here's why:
- Contextual behavior: Location informs behavior. For example, how a parent shops in a big-box store with kids around may vary greatly from how they plan purchases at home alone.
- Sensory details: Environments heighten senses – lighting, packaging, and signage in a retail space trigger emotional and cognitive responses that can be observed and documented.
- Emotional connections: In-home visits offer a glimpse into people’s personal lives and habits, which can foster empathy and reveal deeper decision-making drivers.
Linking Location with Research Objectives
Choosing locations for empathy trek research should always align with your overarching business questions. Ask yourself: Where do my consumers make buying decisions? Where do pain points show up in their routines? Where does the product live or get used?
For example:
- In-home visit: Ideal for understanding how a product fits into a person’s daily life, routines, and space.
- Retail shadowing: Best suited for discovering what drives a customer’s purchase decision at the shelf, or how they navigate brick-and-mortar stores.
- On-the-go observation: Useful for capturing how consumers behave in public settings, commute patterns, or mobile interactions with brands and services.
Ultimately, empathy treks are about seeing the world through your customer’s eyes. When you select the right environment, you increase the chance of uncovering the kind of insight that leads to breakthrough thinking – insights rooted in reality, not assumptions.
Top Types of Empathy Trek Locations: A Beginner’s Guide
If you’re beginning your journey into empathy treks, knowing what types of locations to consider is a great place to start. The setting you choose shapes the lens through which you understand consumer behavior, so it's important to match your research goal with the most appropriate environment.
1. In-Home Visits
What it is: Visiting individuals or families in their homes to observe how they live, make choices, and use products in their daily lives.
Why it works: The home is full of context and cues that influence how people behave and why. From pantry storage patterns to how routines unfold in the morning rush, this intimate setting reveals personal habits and real-life challenges.
Best for: Understanding product usage, day-to-day routines, unmet needs, and emotional connections with a category. These in-home visit market research examples are especially powerful in categories like food, parenting, cleaning, wellness, and technology setup.
2. Retail Shadowing
What it is: Following or observing a customer as they shop in-store, often with interviews before, during, or after the visit.
Why it works: Retail environments are decision-making hubs. Watching shoppers navigate aisles, packaging, and promotions offers direct insight into how people make tradeoffs, spot brands, and experience the path to purchase.
Best for: Exploring purchase decision triggers, brand consideration, shelf navigation, and shopper pain points. Retail shadowing tips for researchers include observing both verbal and non-verbal behaviors – like hesitation, confusion, or engagement – at the moment of decision.
3. Mobile and On-the-Go Observations
What it is: Observing consumers as they go about daily routines outside of structured settings – commuting, running errands, using mobile apps, or interacting with public services.
Why it works: Many behaviors happen outside of the home or store. Capturing them in real-time through shadowing or diary studies opens up new insights into spontaneous decisions or habitual actions.
Best for: Understanding mobility-related experiences, gig economy behavior, digital usage on-the-move, and quick decision-making moments. Knowing how to conduct a mobile observation study shows how brands live within consumer journeys, not just touchpoints.
Other Emerging Settings
Depending on your industry or category, other environments may be suitable for qualitative research techniques:
- Workplaces: Especially relevant in B2B user experience research or productivity product studies.
- Community spaces: Useful for cultural or neighborhood-focused brands evaluating shared behavior.
- Virtual environments: For digital services or remote user interactions, where virtual ethnographies can still apply human-centered observation.
Choosing empathy trek locations doesn’t have to be complex. Think about where your customers are when problems arise, decisions are made, or products are used. Matching location to your business question is the first step toward uncovering truly human-centered consumer insights.
When to Use In-Home Visits for Deeper Consumer Understanding
In-home visits are one of the most powerful tools used in empathy trek research. This method involves spending time inside a participant’s home to observe how they live, interact with products, and make decisions in their day-to-day environment. When chosen thoughtfully, this setting can unlock invaluable consumer insights that are tough to uncover in focus groups or surveys alone.
Why in-home visits work
Homes are where people feel most comfortable and behave most naturally. Observing someone in their personal space allows researchers to understand the full context in which products and services are used. From how a family organizes their pantry to how they prepare dinner or choose cleaning supplies, these subtle behaviors often reveal unmet needs or routine-based preferences that qualitative research aims to surface.
When should you choose in-home visits?
In-home visits are ideal in scenarios such as:
- Product usage studies: For goods like appliances, personal care items, or household products where context affects usage.
- Health and wellness research: To explore routines involving medication, caregiving, or wellness regimens where emotion and privacy matter.
- Parenting or family life research: To understand family dynamics during routine activities like meals, homework, or bedtime.
These settings enrich user experience research by exposing the emotional, social, and logistical factors influencing customer behavior. For example, a brand might learn that a kitchen product is rarely used not because it underperforms, but because it’s difficult to store or clean – something easily overlooked without in-home observation.
Best practices for in-home empathy treks
To ensure successful in-home visits within your market research approach:
- Keep the conversation casual and non-intrusive.
- Use a semi-structured guide with open-ended questions.
- Pay attention to both verbal and non-verbal cues.
- Document any workarounds or hacks the participant uses.
This type of field research method gives your team a window into lived experiences – an essential step for designing solutions that truly resonate. For businesses aiming to improve everyday functionality or emotional connection with their users, in-home visits are often the most effective location choice for empathy trek research.
How Retail Shadowing Reveals Real-Time Purchase Behaviors
Retail shadowing is a method of observational research that allows you to follow consumers as they shop – whether in grocery stores, department stores, or other retail settings. Unlike in-home visits, which focus on day-to-day life, retail shadowing zeroes in on decision-making moments at the point of sale. The location here plays a defining role in which insights come to light.
The value of retail environments
Physical stores are dynamic ecosystems of information, choice, value perception, and, sometimes, impulse. Empathy trek sessions in these spaces capture how real decisions are made in real time – which shelves get noticed, what signage influences reconsideration, and how external distractions (like kids or time pressure) impact the shopping experience.
Retail shadowing is especially powerful for:
- Understanding path-to-purchase: How consumers navigate the store and what they see first or last.
- Package and shelf testing: Whether packaging stands out, is readable, or helps drive selection.
- Pricing and promotion decisions: Observing how discounts, promotions, and price tags are interpreted.
When is this method most useful?
Choose retail shadowing when you’re targeting product development, merchandising strategies, or category innovation. It’s also helpful when optimizing the user experience of your product in a competitive in-store setting.
For example, a snack brand could learn that shoppers rarely explore the full snack aisle – instead, they grab what’s eye-level and move on. This insight shapes how products should be displayed and even packaged to maximize impact.
Tips for effective retail empathy treks
Retail shadowing requires a delicate balance between observation and interaction. Here’s how to make it work:
- Minimize disruption: Shadow in a way that’s respectful and unobtrusive.
- Ask follow-ups post-purchase: Understand the “why” behind the selection after the shop.
- Use mobile tools: Capture movement, eye tracking, or even participant selfies if appropriate.
Retail spaces are more than shelves – they are real-world decision labs. With empathy-based market research in these locations, you access insights not just about what people buy, but how and why they choose. That information is key to refining brand strategies and retail execution tactics.
Capturing Everyday Moments with On-the-Go Observations
On-the-go observations – also known as mobile or in-the-moment ethnographic research – capture customers as they move through their daily routines. This form of empathy trek research excels at uncovering spontaneous behaviors and unfiltered decision points that happen outside traditional spaces like home or stores.
Why mobile and real-time matters
Consumers don’t live in a vacuum. Much of their decision-making happens in motion – at work, during errands, in transit, or even while scrolling on their phones between tasks. Capturing these “in-between” moments through short, real-time reflection prompts or guided self-recordings helps fill gaps in understanding.
Best use cases for mobile observation studies
Leverage this approach when you want to:
- Monitor emerging habits: Like how people use wearable tech throughout the day.
- Capture contextual influences: Such as environmental, social, or time-based factors affecting behavior.
- Understand experiential triggers: Especially for services like food delivery, transport, fitness, or finance apps.
Mobile tools and video-recorded entries allow participants to share thoughts as they go – delivering unpolished, candid moments that structured interviews may miss. You also access a wider variety of environments, making it one of the most flexible methods for choosing locations in empathy treks.
Designing effective on-the-go research
Unlike traditional observational research in one location, these studies follow participants across contexts. To make the most of them:
- Use timed check-ins or prompts throughout the day to avoid overload.
- Offer clear guidance on what to share – mood, decision, surroundings.
- Incorporate multimedia submissions – voice, photo, or video for richer insight.
For brands exploring how customer behaviors and emotions intersect across mobile moments, this method offers unmatched depth. It’s especially valuable within digitally connected categories, where behavior is shaped by multiple factors in real time.
When selecting settings for your empathy trek, incorporating mobile or on-the-go observation is not just convenient but essential. It ensures you’re meeting consumers where they live, shop – and everything in between.
Summary
Choosing the right locations for an empathy trek is critical to uncovering meaningful consumer insights. Whether you're stepping into a home, walking alongside a shopper, or capturing on-the-go moments, each environment provides a unique lens into customer behavior and decision-making.
In-home visits reveal the emotional and routine-driven factors behind how people live; retail shadowing uncovers real-time reactions and shelf-level choices; and mobile observations spotlight the unspoken rituals of our daily flow.
Together, these empathy-based field research methods help you create products, services, and experiences that resonate deeply with real people. By meeting consumers in their natural habitats, your research becomes more authentic, your strategies more informed, and your outcomes more human-centered.
Summary
Choosing the right locations for an empathy trek is critical to uncovering meaningful consumer insights. Whether you're stepping into a home, walking alongside a shopper, or capturing on-the-go moments, each environment provides a unique lens into customer behavior and decision-making.
In-home visits reveal the emotional and routine-driven factors behind how people live; retail shadowing uncovers real-time reactions and shelf-level choices; and mobile observations spotlight the unspoken rituals of our daily flow.
Together, these empathy-based field research methods help you create products, services, and experiences that resonate deeply with real people. By meeting consumers in their natural habitats, your research becomes more authentic, your strategies more informed, and your outcomes more human-centered.