Case Study: ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY APP
Ethnographic study app, real-time qualitative observation withoutin-person accompaniment
AI Powered Qualitative Research Platform
Context
Qualitative research, UX, and consumer insights teams share a common limitation:
Understanding what people actually do in real life without relying solely on interviews, surveys, or physical accompaniment.
SSI identified the opportunity to build a digital tool capable of capturing spontaneous evidence in real moments, functioning across online and offline scenarios and converting multimodal records into actionable business intelligence.
Challenge
Traditional shadowing studies require physical accompaniment, extensive field coordination, manual follow-up, and significant operational resources.
This limits scale, increases costs, and delays results.
The challenge was to build a platform that preserved the depth of qualitative observation while operating more efficiently enabling remote activity registration, centralized monitoring, participant management, and automated analysis
The SSI
Solution
Salamanca Solutions International developed an AI powered digital shadowing tool comprising a mobile app and a web management platform. Participants register real activities through audio, text,or image (including offline), with each entry automatically organized by user, date, time, and moment of day to build individual journey maps.
From the web platform, teams create studies, activate participants, configure reminders, monitor progress, and manage role-based permissions across Administrator, Study Manager, and Client profiles. The AI engine transcribes audio, identifies keywords, classifies emotions, analyzes sentiment, and structures findings into matrices, journey maps, and dashboards, also indicating when collected data shows sufficient consistency or requires further iterations.
Impact
- Eliminated the need for exclusively in-person shadowing execution
- Reduced operational effort, coordination, travel, and analysis time
- Compressed results generation from multiple days of manual review to journeys, emotional matrices, and dashboards available in minutes or hours
- Enabled evidence based business decisions grounded in real behavioral patterns
AI audio transcription · Sentiment analysis · Emotion classification · Mobile app with offline support · Role-based web management platform · Automated journey mapping · Dashboard and insights generation