<aside> ⭐ User logs (diaries) of daily activities as they occur give contextual insights about real-time user behaviors and needs, helping define UX feature requirements. A diary study is a longitudinal user experience (UX) research method that allows your team to explore how users use your digital product over time. Diary studies often include a combination of videos, photos, and survey questions, in addition to product analytics, which provides your team with a rich mix of qualitative and quantitative data.
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A diary study is a research method used to collect qualitative data about user behaviors, activities, and experiences over time. In a diary study, data is self-reported by participants longitudinally — that is, over an extended period of time that can range from a few days to even a month or longer.
During the defined reporting period, study participants are asked to keep a diary and log specific information about activities being studied. To help participants remember to fill in their diary, sometimes they are periodically prompted (for example, through a notification received daily or at select times during the day).
The context and time period in which data is collected for a diary study make them unlike other common user-research methods, such as User Survey (which are designed to collect self-reported information about a user’s habits and experiences outside of the context of the scenarios being studied), or Usability Testing (which yield observational information about a specific moment or planned set of confined interactions in a lab setting). They are the “poor man’s field study”: they are unlikely to provide observations that are as rich or detailed as a true field study, but they can serve as a decent approximation.
The main idea of this method is to collect long-term qualitative data from the users. Participants report their activities over a period of time. During User Interview, self-reporting errors can occur, it means that people don’t always remember perfectly how they do things, and what we say is not necessarily the same as what we actually do. The Diary Studies method solves this issue, since it provides on-the-spot feedback.
The main goals of this method are:
If you’re looking for a contextual understanding of user behaviors and experiences over time, it can be very difficult to appropriately create scenarios in a lab setting to gather these kind of insights. Diary studies are useful for understanding long-term behaviors such as: