The rise of the routine study
Blog summary: Routines… those small, repeated acts of daily life are becoming the most valuable lens in modern research. Drawing on Indeemo’s Q3 2025 project patterns, this blog explains why “routine studies” (diary, longitudinal, and in-context approaches) are rising fast across product experience, health and wellness, shopper journeys, digital life, family dynamics, and culture. It shows how real-life capture reveals the gap between intention and behaviour, why cross-lens routine work is increasingly normal, and what this shift means for insight teams heading into 2026.
Est. read time: 7mins
Everyday life becoming the new centre of insight
Routines are having a moment. Not the shiny “perfect morning” kind. Real routines: the small repeated acts that make life work. What we cook automatically, how we manage symptoms, the way we shop on a Tuesday evening, the apps we open without thinking.
And in research, these patterns are no longer background noise. They’re increasingly the main story.
Looking across Q3 2025 activity on Indeemo, a clear shift is visible: clients are choosing methods that capture behaviour as it unfolds in real contexts, over time, through repetition. The emphasis isn’t just on what people say – it’s on what they do, in the flow of everyday life.
This is the rise of the routine study: insight built from what people actually do, again and again, in the realities of daily living.
What is a routine study?
A routine study is any qualitative approach designed to understand repeated real-world behaviours over time. Instead of asking people to recall what they did, it captures life in the moment across days or weeks.
Think:
digital behaviour “day in the life” studies
Why it matters: routines are where truth lives. They reveal:
the workarounds people forget to mention
micro-decisions that shape loyalty and switching
how context changes behaviour (time, place, people, mood)
the gap between intention and lived reality
Indeemo’s Q3 data shows clients leaning directly into that gap.
What Q3 2025 on Indeemo tells us about routine research
Q3 2025 was a highly active quarter on Indeemo, and the portfolio points to one central truth: routine-based research is no longer niche. It is happening across sectors, study types, and question areas.
Three patterns stand out:
Routine-heavy areas led the work.
Projects clustered strongly in spaces where repeated behaviour is essential to understanding reality. Particularly product-in-use, health and wellness journeys, and everyday shopping behaviours. Routine capture wasn’t an add-on; it was the backbone.Real life didn’t fit into single lenses.
Many projects blended multiple perspectives, like product experience paired with shopper journeys, or digital life intersecting with purchase behaviour and family context. That cross-lens design reflects the truth of routines: daily life doesn’t live in silos.Momentum accelerated through the quarter.
The Q3 timeline shows a clear build in activity toward the end of the quarter, driven by real-world ethnographies, longitudinal product trials, and lived-experience health work.
Data snapshot: What the quarter revealed
Routine research is spread across all pillars.
Q3 projects were distributed across Indeemo’s six research pillars, with particularly strong representation in pillars naturally tied to everyday repetition - product experience & usage, health & wellness, and shopper journeys. Routine studies are now also common in digital life, youth/family, and brand/culture work.
Cross-pillar routines are becoming normal.
A substantial share of Q3 projects carried a meaningful secondary pillar, showing that clients increasingly want the front-stage/back-stage routine story: how people choose something and how they live with it.
Common overlaps included:
product experience × shopper journeys
technology & digital life × shopper journeys
youth/family life × health & wellness
brand/culture × product experience
Routine work is expanding beyond classic categories.
The portfolio shows routine research thriving not just in FMCG, but across healthcare, technology, retail/e-Commerce, fintech, public sector, and social impact. Routines are now the lens for understanding everything from chronic condition management to AI tool usage to household budgeting.
Why routine studies are rising now
Q3 data reflects a wider market shift. Here’s what’s behind it:
Real behaviour beats recalled opinion
Clients want to move past recall bias and polished “what I think I do” stories. Indeemo studies in Q3 consistently captured real-life behaviour through diaries, video, photo, and screen recording—so insight is grounded in what people actually do.
Products and services are lived over time
Product testing and experience studies remain routine-first because the truth of a product emerges only through repeated use. Q3 work showed strong demand for in-situ trials that follow people from first use into habit.
Health insight requires longitudinal truth
Health studies in Q3 highlighted lived condition management, treatment routines, recovery journeys, and emotional burden. These realities don’t show up in a single interview—they surface through rhythms, patterns, and daily negotiation.
Shopping is a routine, not a moment
Shopper and buyer work in Q3 treated buying as a cycle: planned shops, quick missions, hybrid app-plus-store journeys. This is shopping inside the week, not shopping inside a lab.
Digital life is daily life
Q3 tech projects demonstrated that digital behaviour is now part of routine infrastructure: fitness trackers, AI tools, streaming rituals, social scrolling, smart-home habits. The only way to understand these is to see them repeatedly in context.
What routine studies looked like across the six pillars
Routine research showed up everywhere in Q3, but in slightly different ways across pillars.
Product experience & usage: Life with products, not opinions about products
Clients used Indeemo to understand how products are integrated into daily patterns – what gets repeated, what gets forgotten, and what hacks people invent in real homes and real weeks.
Health & wellness: Routines of coping, adapting, and managing
Health projects captured real condition life over time such as symptom rhythms, adherence patterns, caregiver load, and the emotional texture of wellbeing.
Shopper & buyer journeys: Choice inside the weekly rhythm
Shopping projects mapped repeated cycles of need, search, compromise and switching across physical and digital environments.
Technology & digital life: Screen habits as infrastructure
Tech studies tracked how AI tools, apps, platforms and interfaces are threaded into routines of planning, buying, fitness, finance and downtime.
Youth, family & daily life: Household routines under pressure
Youth/family work focused on lived schedules such as feeding, finances, schooling, identity, community belonging, where routine is shaped by context and constraint.
Brand, culture & storytelling: Meaning in repetition
Even brand and culture studies leaned on routine capture; rituals around holidays, socialising, fandom, and everyday identity performance.
The front-stage / back-stage truth of routines
Q3 overlaps show a clear structure emerging in modern research:
Front-stage: how people choose (shopping journeys, onboarding, decision moments)
Back-stage: how they live with the choice (usage routines, health management, family context)
The prevalence of cross-lens work makes sense because routines naturally connect decisions to daily life.
What this means for insight teams in 2026
Based on Q3 patterns, routine studies are heading in three directions:
Routine capture becomes the default for complex questions.
If behaviour is embedded in context such as health, family, finance, digital life – routine studies will be the baseline.Cross-lens projects keep growing.
The more teams chase real life, the more pillars overlap. Routines don’t sit neatly in one box.Ecological validity becomes a competitive advantage.
Clients want research that holds up in strategy rooms because it mirrors life as it is lived, not as it is remembered.
Key takeaways
Q3 2025 shows Indeemo being used as a routine-first insight engine: a place where organisations come to understand the repeated, emotional, contextual patterns that shape people’s lives.
The rise of the routine study isn’t a trend layered on top of “real research.”
It is real research, because real life happens in repetition.
When you understand routines, you understand:
what people actually do
why they keep doing it
what would make them change
and how products, services, and systems earn a place in daily life
That’s where insight is going next.
FAQ
What is a routine study in qualitative research?
A routine study captures repeated real-world behaviour over time—often through diary, video, photo, or in-context tasks—so researchers see daily life as it’s lived.
Why are routine studies growing in 2025?
Because they reduce recall bias and show real behaviour in context. Indeemo’s Q3 patterns demonstrate organisations increasingly choosing in-situ and longitudinal methods.
What kinds of questions suit routine studies best?
Daily product usage, health management, hybrid shopping, family life, and digital habits—exactly where Q3 work clustered.
How long should a routine study run?
Typically 1–4 weeks, depending on the behaviour cycle (weekly shops, treatment rhythms, usage adaptation).