Diary studies

Take a deep look at the user experience over time by asking participants to capture their activities through words, photos, and/or videos.

A few days to a few months.

Well-structured diary studies last for an extended period of time in order to capture the entirety of a user journey. Participants might log their activities for up to a few months, depending on the scope of the research. Since you'll be gathering a lot of qualitative data, you should expect analysis to take awhile, too.

Understanding how users interact with a service or product over time. Participants can log their behavior and activities, allowing you to learn more about their habits, decision making, technology use, emotional states, and more. Diary studies can be especially helpful if you are trying to understand or evaluate the user experience across channels, time, and space. They also have the benefit of providing you with both behavioral data (what people do) and attitudinal data (what people think).

Examples of helpful diary studies and their time frames within a college setting could be:

As with all research studies, you'll want to define your focus, scope, and research questions. It can be easy to succumb to scope creep, especially with longer diary studies, so be thoughtful about defining what information is directly relevant to your research.

Based on your scope and research questions, establish a timeline for your study.

Incentives for participants, such as:

A tool for participants to submit their data, such as:

Technology for capturing audio or video, such as:

A tool for visualizing, coding, and analyzing qualitative data, such as:

More so than other methods, you'll want to target your recruitment of participants and screen them carefully. Make sure your participants fit within your target audience and that they will reliably submit data for the study for the period of time.

You'll need a framework for participants to use to input their data. This is often in the form of a questionnaire that might have a combination of multiple-choice questions (e.g. how long was your visit?), open-ended questions (e.g. describe your experience), and the ability to upload files (e.g. photos, screenshots).

Since participants will be logging their data on their own (without moderation), it's important you establish instructions and expectations clearly upfront. Communicate how much time per day or week you expect participants to spend contributing to the study. In your instructions, make it clear if you expect participants to log activities in their entirety as they occur ("in situ") or use the two-part snippet technique, recording short snippets as activities occur (such as through a text message) and then elaborating after the fact.

Especially for lengthier studies, keep participants motivated. Send out periodic thank-yous as well as scheduled reminders through email or text.

While you don't have to look at data until the end of the time period, there are benefits to reviewing the data as it comes in. This gives you an opportunity to ask follow-up or clarifying questions or participants as well as adjust the study if needed (e.g. revising or adding questions).

You'll end up with a significant amount of qualitative data. With your research questions as your guiding lens, use an affinity diagram to cluster ideas and pull out themes. To visualize your results, create a journey or experience map.

To gather further data, consider conducting user interviews with participants at the beginning and end of the study. Pre-interviews can tell you more about participants' backgrounds and contexts. Post-interviews can help clarify and build upon data collected in the diaries.

A great benefit of diary studies is they provide you with authentic stories. Photos, videos, and quotes can be especially compelling in presentations to stakeholders.

As you are going through your analysis, pull out quotes that represent key themes from the study. Be careful not to overwhelm with data. A helpful way to present your findings is by identifying a handful of key findings followed by an example or two from the data to back them up.

Diary Studies: A Quick Primer by Kelly Moran

Diary Studies: Understanding Long-Term User Behavior and Experiences by Kim Salazer