#diary studies

I asked all my ethnography participants to keep a 3 night sleep diary before interviews I'll conduct over the next two days. Although all my participants have very different lives, jobs and schedules, needing to unwind in bed before sleep is a common thread throughout.

For the past seven months I was part of the research team on a large-scale project that incorporated two research methods repeated over the course of seven waves of participants. The first method was a hybrid of contextual inquiries and usability testing where researchers went to participants’ homes and watched them interact with hardware and software for a new in-home device. The second method, and the subject I’m discussing today, was a digital diary study, of which I was the lead moderator.

Diary studies will vary from research project to research project but in the context of our work participants were given devices to use in their home and each day, over the course of about a week, they would complete activities with the device and answer questions using an online questionnaire or digital diary tool. The diary portion helped us collect valuable quantitative and qualitative feedback, enabled us to interact with participants in different geographical areas, and helped us to discover how behaviors and attitudes changed over time.

Repeating this over seven months with seven waves of participants allowed us to also iterate on how we administered the diary portion (as well as the in-homes sessions) of this study. That iteration has produced some key “Do’s and Don’ts” of diary studies. Use these to help ensure your research is the most effective it can be.

Last month on the 25th May, I had the pleasure of attending the very first Research Thing event at the Fortune Cookie offices. The first event was themed around Diary Studies and there was three speakers -- Boon Chew, Lee McIvor (of Lightning UX fame) and Beth Duddy. 

For those of you not familiar with User Experience techniques, a diary study is something that requires users, or observers of users, to keep track of activities or events in some form of diary or log for a particular period of time.

I've been thinking that my usage of Tumblr vs. WordPress is dramatically different. I go long periods of time without updating my WordPress, but with Tumblr, it's been a few days, maybe a week till I want to share something again. Although I'm just starting my Tumblr, I feel more encouraged to keep it going oddly. Is it because Tumblr emphasizes that posts can be short and sweet? Or maybe it's the fun icons they use to differentiate between photos, text, quotes, etc. It just makes it seem so easy, yet I have a much better readership and visibility on WordPress. (or maybe it's just that! I don't have the readers so I don't feel I have to censor or cater to a certain crowd and can write free-spiritedly.)