who's walking who?
an ethnographic study of emotional labor in care work
Role
User Researcher
Timeline
4 Weeks | Sep 2025 - Oct 2025
Team
Partner - Amelie Or
THE setup
We spent 20+ hours embedded in the world of Bay Area dog walkers.
I shadowed professional dog walkers, interviewed them, walked dogs alongside them. The goal: understand a community through participant observation, not just interviews. We wanted to better understand the needs of professional dog walkers by gaining a better understanding of their lives, not just their jobs.
20+
Hours of fieldwork
6
In-depth interviews
3
Major findings
Initial Assumptions: Being raised with dogs, I'd initially assumed that:
Professional dog walking was something one was drawn to due to love for dogs and a desire to spend time with them as a side hustle/gig work.
To me, the role was akin to Doordash driving or Shipt shopping, and the job itself was mostly owners bringing their dogs to one person who walked them then stayed at a designated spot until pickup was completed.
The hardest part of the job was keeping that many dogs in line.
When Amelie and I decided to study dog walkers further, we were fascinated by the mass. Was walking 8-10 dogs at once easier or harder than we thought?
USER RESEARCH
After 20+ hours of interviews, walks, and discussion, we utilized affinity mapping to make sense of our data.
We created 3 main findings from our analysis. To communicate an understanding of our walkers that was grounded in the hours we spent getting to know them, our findings needed to be clear, grounded in first-order observation, and novel, revealing something about them that we only could have learned through the time we spent.
Then, using the Five Whys framework, we directed our findings and data into actionable insights and needs.
Beginning of data synthesis - quotes, observed behaviors, patterns across interviews, categorization of common themes/motifs, and more
findings
the insight
Dog walkers are deeply empathetic individuals who have often been overlooked, mistreated, or burned by unstable systems; they use dog walking as a way to bring the care, stability, and compassion into the world that they feel is missing.
Dog walking as gig work might serve as the entry point, but eventually, their lives become centered around the dogs they walk and the owners they service. They exist within a cycle of being the stable force of care for others and not having enough energy to reciprocate that care in their personal lives due to the lines between their personal and professional lives constantly being blurred.
More quotes relating to hustle culture & struggle
research methods
Ethnographic observation + semi-structured interviews
✓
20+ hours of participant observation (shadowing, walking dogs alongside professionals)
✓
6 in-depth semi-structured interviews with professional dog walkers
✓
5 Whys methodology to uncover root causes of behavioral patterns
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Thematic analysis using empathy mapping and affinity diagramming
✓
Field notes and voice recordings (with consent) for synthesis
Why ethnography matters: Interviews alone wouldn't have revealed these patterns. I needed to see how walkers interacted with dogs, how they talked about their work when they thought nobody was analyzing them, how their body language shifted from question to question. I needed to see where their mindset was on the job, and it was important for me to stand in their shoes with them as they did it.
design opportunities
This research uncovered product directions that will not only impact professional dog walkers, but anyone performing professional care work.
As an additional exercise, I decided to craft potential design directions for potential products serving dog walkers, leveraging Claude AI as a synthesis and ideation partner.
The North Star:
"Would this make work feel more like care or labor?"
Read more about how I would pitch this research to inform product decisions here!
reflections
Research isn't just about finding answers; it's about discovering novelties in unanticipated rabbit holes.
Walking interviews took anywhere from 1 to 5 hours, so our strongest observations didn't come from questions we made; they came from the questions that came from answers we heard and the curiosities that sparked as we did the job with the walkers.
From completing pickups and dropoffs to changing note-taking strategies on walks that moved over 4 miles per hour, our best work came from grounding ourselves in the environment and asking questions that arose from the gap between what we assumed and what we saw being in the dog walking space.
Ultimately, this project served as a reminder that there is no understanding the needs of any group until you attempt to live their lives, not just in a professional sense, but in a personal one as well. User research functions as the glue between product innovation and real-world impact; I was thrilled by the opportunity to scratch the surface of how much there was to uncover, no matter how attuned to the group I believed my assumptions were.
Additional info