Why Conduct a Diary Study?
A diary study is a user experience research method where participants keep track of certain activities or respond to prompts or questions over a period of time. Powered by online tools, diary studies often include a combination of user-generated videos and photos, as well as responses to survey questions. This provides your team with a rich mix of qualitative and quantitative data.
When are diary studies the right UX research method?
Like all user research methods, whether or not you should conduct a diary study is dependent on your research questions. There are two major areas where diary studies are particularly well-suited to offer insights.
First, diary studies allow your team to examine behaviors, preferences, and subjective reactions over time. Teams that are interested in learning more about the user onboarding experience, how to keep users around (also known as retention), or what content or features could increase engagement could use a diary study to get the insights they need. Diary studies allow your team to examine, for example, the first week a user uses your product.
Second, diary studies give you an inside look into how users behave in their own environments—like where they live or work, for example. This is particularly helpful in cases where it’s not practical to have a researcher present. You’re able to “observe” and gain additional context as if you were actually there. Because everything is done remotely and is user-initiated, your team can gather information from a wide-range of participants—something that would often be impractical using other research methods.
If your research questions include a time period and your goal is to explore an activity in-depth while still casting a wide net in terms of the information you might gather, a diary studies are worth considering. You may be asking, for example:
How are users consuming our content during the work week?
What challenges are users encountering during our multi-day onboarding process?
How are parents planning educational activities for their children now that everyone is at home?
What are our customer’s night-time rituals?
One project Voice+Code led was a pretty obvious candidate for a diary study. A mobile app designed for people to use when they first woke up, it was pretty impractical for us to send researchers into users’ homes. Further, we wanted to explore the app’s use over an extended period of time with participants across the United States. Would people open the app multiple times per day? For what purpose? Did use change on the weekends? A diary study was a cost-effective solution that gave us the information we needed to develop and prioritize new app features.
Follow up a diary study with one-on-one interviews
In the example described above, we were able to gather a large amount of meaningful data in a short period of time. Even better, we were able to uncover insights to questions we never even thought to ask. But, despite all of this data, our team still had follow-up questions. For example, participants often alluded to behaviors or use cases that we found really interesting—but they stopped short of explaining in detail. We really needed to ask them follow-up questions to truly understand what they meant and how we could help them. That’s why we strongly recommend including a round of one-on-one interviews with at least some of the diary study participants at the conclusion of the diary study.
Make sure participants will actually complete the study
Another thing to keep in mind when considering a diary study is weighing the likelihood that all participants will complete the study. Often the diary study software that provides the most benefits in terms of data captured requires participants to download an app to their phones—something not all people want to do.
Further, diary studies require participants to remember to complete their entries over multiple days. Because of this, we recommend devoting a team member to check in on participants to remind them to complete their diary study entry for that day. While you should over-recruit for any user research method, you’ll want to assume at the beginning of a diary study that at least 15-20% of participants won’t complete the study. In addition, you should offer participants an incentive to complete the diary study (for example, a gift card).
In what cases would a diary study not be the right user research method?
Diary studies are great for exploratory research. They are less helpful when your team is trying to diagnose and fix a specific user experience problem. Why? Because diary studies give participants a lot of freedom to choose what they show you and what they talk about. If your team has identified that users are having issues completing a certain task using your product, your resources would be much better spent conducting a usability study where you can ask the user to perform that task and ask follow-up questions after they attempt to complete it.
In some cases, field studies/ethnographic studies are a better alternative to diary studies. Observing users in their own environment gives researchers access to information that users can’t (for example, if they can’t record something) or are unlikely to share (either because they don’t want to share it or because they don’t think to share it).
While diary studies aren’t the solution to every user research question, they should be a part of your user research toolkit. Consider diary studies when your team is interested in users’ behaviors, preferences, and subjective reactions over time and where understanding context is particularly important. Online UX research services allow you to recruit, create, manage, and analyze your diary studies—making them more accessible than ever.
Interested in learning more about UX research methods? Learn about our UX ROI workshop.