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Shadowing

What it is

Shadowing is a technique that allows you to immerse yourself in the lives of customers, front line staff and people behind the scenes. You usually spend up to a day with people, quietly observing their daily routines and (if possible) participating in their activities. Shadowing offers a vital advantage over traditional forms of research like surveys or focus groups: they let you spot the real moments when problems occur as well as situations where people say one thing but actually do something quite different.

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Day shadowing at Walker Technology College

What you get

Shadowing helps you understand how people really use your service, and how you could improve the experience in terms of what they would like the service to offer and not. Spending some quality time with people, allows you to see where problems arise, helping you for getting ideas of how to change it. Besides identifying process steps, resources and touchpoints, you tend to generate a more holistic view on how a complex system works, including the interplay of various stakeholders. We often produce a journey map as a representation of our findings.

When to use it

We normally use shadowing techniques usually at the early stages of a project to gain meaningful insights into people and their experiences of a service. It is never used on its own, but as part of our wider ethnographic research.