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What is a Diary Study?

In a diary study, participants keep a log of thoughts and experiences either about a product, a process, or some sort of activity in their real-world environment. It’s a record of their behavior that researchers later parse and analyze to better understand the quality of the user’s experience. It comes with a fun term that describes its timeline: longitudinal! This means over a period of time, usually from a few days up to a few weeks.

Diary studies get into the nitty gritty of what motivates us to take certain actions, why we engage in certain behaviors, and our attitudes about things. You get to see habits and patterns as they’re exposed over time. And they’re great at answering those “why” questions about user behavior.

Diary studies are unique from other research methods in that they’re a relatively hands-off and economical way to gather loads of useful qualitative data (and sometimes quantitative data, too).

Why

Diary studies are best applied in cases when you’re looking for an affordable way to observe user behavior in a natural real-life environment as users are living through their experiences. They’re great for gathering data over time as opposed to one-instance-only type studies, like observing users in a lab on a single visit. They’re also appropriate when you’re looking to generate new qualitative and quantitative insights in the earliest stages of the development cycle.

How

Conducting diary studies

Actually conducting a diary study has five main phases: planning, onboarding, monitoring, debriefing, and analysis. It’s important to put roughly equal energy and effort into all five phases to get useful and usable results.