Running a diary study

And why this ethnographic method can lend to great insights

👋🏻Hi, this is Nikki with a 🔒subscriber-only 🔒 article from User Research Academy. In every article, I cover in-depth topics on how to conduct user research, grow in your career, and fall in love with the craft of user research again.

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**A quick note before you dive into this article. I used dscout for this project, so you will see references to their diary study tool. There are many other tools you can use (e.g.: Indeemo), or you can do everything manually, depending on your budget.**

Diary studies have become hugely popular since Covid started, and I believe it’s due to the remote nature of our user research research.

Before Covid, the world was open for us to do field studies and run methods like contextual inquiry. This type of approach gave us key insights into the environmental context of our users and the unknown unknowns. We could observe them in their natural setting to understand how they operated in the world.

With Covid, that became challenging, if not impossible. And, even with things like contextual inquiry becoming possible again, it’s not always an available method. In fact, we conduct more remote research studies now than ever.

With the remote approach can come a lack of context, a lack of “real-world” settings and reactions, and a lack of context and environment. Diary studies have tried to pick up where we left off with contextual inquiry by giving us an insider look into our participants’ lives.

What are diary studies?

Diary studies are a qualitative, longitudinal method that allows participants to record their thoughts, experiences, and perceptions through activities. These activities can come in many different forms, such as writing text, recording audio or video, screen recordings, or taking photos.

Typically, with these types of studies, you are getting participants to respond to activities within their environment in more natural ways than something like a 1x1 interview. Although diary studies don’t replace contextual inquiry - literally nothing can - they are still a great tool to use if you want to get a remote understanding of participants’ context, environment, and reactions in a more real-world setting.

When to use a diary study

As fantastic as they are, diary studies have a time and a place. Since they are qualitative and longitudinal, they can take a long time to get the results and are geared toward more of a generative understanding of your participants’ and their context.

As always, when it comes to figuring out which method is best for your study, the best thing you can do is think about your goals.

If you are struggling with this part of your study, I recommend asking yourself these two questions:

1. What is the goal of the idea/project/problem?

2. What is the expected outcome of the idea/project/problem?

These questions will help you understand what it is you’re trying to achieve and what information you need by the end of the study. Equipped with this knowledge, you are better able to choose a method that gets you that information and helps you accomplish your goals.

If those questions aren’t helping, you can try to fill out this formula:

I need [information] to understand [proposed research goal] to make [decision] that will impact [team/organizational goal]. Then, by the end of the study/workshop, I need [ideal outcome].

Again, these prompts will help you with defining exactly what you and your team need at the end of the study, which helps you pick the most appropriate method.

When it comes to diary studies, certain goals are best suited for this method. The goals I most commonly use for diary studies include:

1. Discover people's current processes/decision-making about [research subject], and how they feel about the overall experience

2. Understand what [research subject] means to people (how they define it) and why it is important to them

3. Learn about people's perceptions of [research subject]

4. Uncover how people interact with or experience [research subject] in their day-to-day lives

5. Discover resources people interact with when it comes to [research subject]

While diary studies can be hugely impactful, and powerful, there are times where they aren’t the best choice of method, such as:

• Quick insights. If you are looking for super quick insights on something, diary studies are not the best option for you because they are meant to span over a certain amount of time.

• Product-focused questions. For really product-focused questions or usability testing responses, I don’t recommend diary studies since they are meant to focus more on participants’ perceptions, context, and environment in a product-agnostic sense. For these types of questions, usability testing is your best bet.

• Quantitative data. While diary studies typically require a larger sample size (we’ll get into that later), they are a qualitative method. Of course you can always follow up with a survey, but the actual diary study looks at qualitative type responses.

• Limited resources. Diary studies produce a lot of qualitative data to sift through. Not only that, but they can also be difficult to set up and maintain. If you have limited capacity, budget, and time, diary studies might not be the best approach (for this particular project). It took me a few weeks to get through and make sense of all of my qualitative data for one of my studies.

• Hard to reach/niche participants. Niche participants are tough to get regardless of methodology, but diary studies require participants to respond multiple times over a set period. So, if you have a participant base that is time-poor or won’t engage regularly, you might be better set up for a one-time approach like interviews.

Again, make sure you look at your goals, outcomes, and constraints when thinking about which method is best for your study!

Let’s set up a diary study!

The first (second, and third) time I set up a diary study, it felt very overwhelming and complex. Since I had never done it, I was confused about all the moving parts and components I should add. I was also unsure how to set up the activities properly.

To make it easier, I will use an example from a project I conducted with dscout (which is why you will see screenshots of their tool). You can also do this manually, and I will share screenshots of how I planned a diary study without a tool as well.

If you want to get a super deep understanding of the ins and outs of this project, as well as access to the data, you can check out this in-depth course I offer. If not, keep on reading through to see how I set up the diary study!

This example (but real) project is about body positivity, body neutrality, and health at every size. Not only are these movements and ideas highly relevant right now, but they also gave us a deeper understanding of how people got into and thought about these concepts.

Previous research has focused specifically on the intersection of social media and body positivity/neutrality or the impact of body positivity/neutrality on body image. Little research is into understanding how people discover, explore, and get inspired by body positivity/neutrality daily. With this project, we aimed to explore participants’ philosophy, the path into, and everyday experiences with the body positivity and body neutrality movement.

Let’s dive into how we set it up!

Writing a research plan

Like with any other study, I always start with a user research plan. My user research plans include:

1. The background of the research project detailing why we are conducting this study. This can also include the internal stakeholders involved.

2. A research statement which captures what we want to understand by the end of the research study and why

3. The research goals, what the teams want to learn from the research, or what they would like the outcome to be. We should be able to answer all the goals by the end of the research project.

4. Any hypotheses or assumptions we have about the topic, participants, or our expected outcomes

5. A breakdown of the participants we are recruiting and how we are recruiting them.

6. How we are conducting the research, which includes the chosen research method.

7. An interview guide/usability test script as a cheat sheet of instructions/questions to follow during the research session. This includes components within itself, such as the introduction, interview questions/tasks and conclusion.

8. An approximate timeline of when the research will occur and when to expect deliverables.

9. Resources for people to find, such as links to any other documentation.

You can read all about setting up a research plan here.

So, as always, we started with a research plan and the most basic components, which included the research statement and goals. The first thing we did was ask ourselves:

• What do we want to learn about body positivity, body neutrality, and health at every size?

• What type of experiences do we want to learn?

• What information do we want at the end of the study?

When asking these questions, if you can, brainstorm together with your team. User research is a team sport and is often a support system for your teams to make better decisions. If you include them in this step, you make it more likely for the research to be a success as well as the research to be actionable for your team.

With these questions, we crafted the following goals:

1. Discover the paths people take to get into the body positivity, body neutrality, or health at every size movement

2. Learn about people's philosophies of body positivity, body neutrality, and health at every size

3. Uncover how people interact with or experience body positivity, body neutrality, and health at every size in their day-to-day lives

4. Discover resources people interact with to gain inspiration from body positivity, body neutrality, and health at every size

Although my go-to methodology tends to be 1x1 interviews, as soon as I saw these goals, I knew they screamed diary study. The reason my mind went to diary studies was particularly because of goals three and four.

Could we have achieved these goals in an interview? Yes, probably. However, with these goals, there would be a lot to cover in the interview. We’d have to get through the path, the philosophies, the interactions, and the resources. Even for a 90-120 minute interview, that was a lot to cover.

And, since this could lead to sensitive topics, would be a high cognitive load for the participant and for the interviewer (I have a sensitive relationship with food and body image, so I knew this would be a challenging yet fulfilling project).

So, instead of shoving all these goals into an interview format, we decided a diary study would be the most ideal, followed by some qualitative interviews and, later on, a survey to help prioritize any insights.

Here is the beginning of our research plan:

Part of our research plan