Introduction: Embracing Real-Life Experiences in Home Design
SH Residential, a leader in residential design, has long understood that building a home is about more than just constructing walls and roofs—it’s about creating a space where people live, grow and thrive. The company sought a deeper understanding of how their homes worked in real life, focusing on empathy and the human experience of daily living. To achieve this, SH Residential partnered with Recollective to bring their research process to life, moving beyond traditional surveys and tapping into real-time, emotional qualitative insights that would directly shape the next generation of home designs.
Background: Identifying the Challenges of Traditional Research
Before partnering with Recollective, SH Residential faced challenges in gathering meaningful insights into home living. Traditional surveys and focus groups failed to capture the depth of emotions, struggles and daily behaviors that shaped a homeowner's experience. In particular, the team struggled to see beyond what consumers rated in surveys, missing out on the real “day in the life” moments that were key to understanding the genuine pain points that influenced their home-buying decisions.
Why Empathy Matters:
Home is one of the most personal spaces in someone’s life, often representing their most significant purchase and emotional investment. To truly connect with their customers, SH Residential recognized the need to go beyond numbers and ratings and instead dive into the emotional, aspirational aspects of what makes a house feel like a home.
Objectives for Insights:
SH Residential needed to understand how their homes functioned for people on a daily basis. This required getting deep insights into homeowners' everyday experiences and identifying their visible and hidden frustrations. The goal was to give designers a more precise direction in creating differentiated, emotionally resonant solutions that met their consumers' real, lived needs.
The Approach: Leveraging Recollective for Deeper Insights
Media-Rich Submissions and Autoethnography
One of the most potent aspects of SH Residential's approach was to collect media-rich submissions using Recollective. Participants were asked to share photos, videos and other multimedia content, creating a visual, more nuanced view of their living spaces. As SH Residential’s team noted, media doesn’t just convey facts—it tells stories, capturing emotions that surveys often miss. This enabled the design team to see real-life occurrences like overflowing laundry baskets or cluttered garages, which provided crucial context for how families used and experienced their homes.
Behavioral Science and Neuroscience in Research
SH Residential also integrated behavioral science into their research process, specifically addressing the "say-do" gap. People often don’t express the challenges they face with their homes, either because they’ve grown accustomed to the discomforts or because they don’t see them as a problem. Recollective’s technology enabled the team to observe and document these challenges through participants’ authentic, unfiltered behaviors and daily routines.
AI and "Day in the Life" Stories
Recollective’s AI tools played a pivotal role in helping SH Residential distill the massive amounts of qualitative data they collected. AI Themes and AI Questions helped identify key moments in participants' daily lives, highlighting moments of frustration, joy and surprise. This enabled SH Residential to hone in on the stresses and pain points that mattered most, ensuring that their designs would address the real issues consumers face in their homes.
Participant Experience: Building Trust and Engagement
SH Residential noticed an immediate shift in participant engagement when using Recollective’s platform. The multimedia elements of the platform made it easier and more enjoyable for participants to share their thoughts and emotions, which led to more authentic feedback.
Photos and Videos as Powerful Storytelling Tools
Nearly 40 participants shared over 400 photos and 400 videos, creating a robust database of real-life experiences that enriched the research process. These media submissions provided a visual and emotional connection that traditional surveys simply couldn’t match. Participants were more willing to open up about their daily lives, frustrations and joys when they could share images of their homes, easily turning abstract, hard-to-explain concepts into tangible stories.
Quality of Feedback
Using videos and photos didn’t just enhance engagement—it also improved the quality of the data. By documenting their daily routines, participants inadvertently shared insights that were often unspoken, allowing the research team to observe behaviors and experiences they might have otherwise missed.
Stakeholder Involvement: Collaborative Research Process
Recollective facilitated greater collaboration between SH Residential’ various departments, from marketing and design to insights and leadership. The ability to share real-time insights with key stakeholders helped align the team around common goals and ensured that the research was actionable and focused.
Involvement of Unexpected Stakeholders
One surprising outcome of the research process was the interest it generated from senior leadership, who found the insights particularly valuable in guiding the company’s long-term strategy. The data didn’t just inform product development—it shaped how the company communicated with and understood its customers.
Results and Outcomes: Driving Design Innovation
The insights gathered through Recollective’s platform were invaluable in shaping SH Residential’s future designs. With a clearer understanding of consumer pain points, the team was able to make more informed, human-centric design decisions.
Key Insights and Impact on Home Design
One significant finding from the study was that certain areas of the home—such as laundry rooms and entryways—were over-indexed in terms of consumer frustration. These areas, often taken for granted in traditional design, became focal points for improvement. This insight directly influenced design changes, such as the reconfiguration of laundry room layouts and more efficient use of entryway spaces.
Faster, More Accurate Insights
The ability to capture and analyze real-time data with the Recollective platform gave the team at SH Residential a significant speed advantage over traditional research methods. Integrating AI tools into daily research tasks allowed the team to quickly validate and distill large quantities of qualitative data, enabling faster decision-making and a more agile design process.
Measurable ROI
The most exciting outcomes the team has seen have been the positive shifts in customer satisfaction. By addressing the real pain points in home living, SH Residential expects to see improved market reception for their new designs, with a more empathetic approach to homebuilding that resonates with potential buyers.
The Future of Research at SH Residential
As consumer expectations continue to evolve, SH Residential plans to use Recollective to stay ahead of trends and to deepen their understanding of what matters most to homeowners. The platform’s ability to collect and analyze emotional, real-time insights will continue to drive product innovation and customer satisfaction. By leveraging the platform’s flexibility and AI-driven insights, SH Residential can adapt its designs more quickly and effectively.
The platform has transformed the team’s ability to empathize with homeowners, allowing them to build stronger, more meaningful connections with their customers and design homes that truly work for people.
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