Basic Procedure for Performing a Diary Study
The basic procedure for collecting information with a Diary Study is shown below:
- Recruiting Participants. Recruit participants for your target markets. Consider participants that represent current customers and potential ones, as their diary studies will have different viewpoints.
- Providing basic instructions. Prepare some basic instructions that describe the Diary Study. You can use a paper or electronic format. You want them to keep their diary, all the way through to completion.
- Scheduling Checkpoints. You will want to schedule checkpoints to keep the participants on task and to answer any questions.
- Customers Return Their Diary. Participants return their diary for analysis. Verify the diary is complete before you move to the next step.
- Analyzing the Dairy. You perform an analysis on the content. Look for common themes. Consider a mind map the data for each participant.
- Following-up with Interviews & Surveys. Consider following-up diary studies with customer interviews to gain further clarity and analysis on the results. In addition, consider running an online survey to validate findings with a larger sample size.
Method #1: Paper-Based Diaries
- You must wait until the diary is returned before starting analysis.
- Data is collected on paper only. You miss certain data points without audio or video.
- Some people just have bad handwriting, so they can be hard to read
- If you need to transcribe notes, paper-based diaries are time consuming.
Quick Tips for Paper-based Diaries
You can mitigate these pitfalls by:
- Include instructions for capturing diary entries, so all the diaries look the same (or as much as possible).
- Tell participants to type out their diary entries, if they think they have bad handwriting. Most people will do it.
- Send out reminders throughout the study to keep participants focused on their diary entries.
- Provide details for when and where to return the diary.
- Consider having participants include pictures, video, or audio files with their paper-based diary.
Method #2: Email-Based Diaries
- Customers may just recall entries later in the day rather than collect it when it happens.
- Customers may forget the exact details, when they report about it later in the day.
- You could follow-up with customers, which can (inadvertently) affect the outcome. They may want to please you.
- Customers may feel different about something after it occurred. You lose how they felt at the time.
Quick Tips for Email-based Diaries
You can mitigate these pitfalls by:
- Telling customers to do a paper-based diary and entering in their details in an email log.
- Tell customers to attach pictures of their paper-based diary in their emails.
- Reduce your interactions in email to primarily instructions, such as turning in your diary log.
- Delay interacting with participants until you see consistent patterns.
- Schedule follow-up interviews after reviewing a larger set of user emails.
Method #3: Text-based Diaries
You interact alot with participants with text-based studies. You collect the data in a real-time fashion, which might be ideal for quick iterations and tight deliverables. Plus, you do collect additional information, such as a date and time stamp, the participant’s name, duration of the message, pictures/audio/video files, and a transcript of the conversation.
These pitfalls exist with text-based diaries:
- You can easily skew results with too much interaction with the participants.
- You may get alot of unrelated information.
- Participants may want to continue conversations with you after the study. (Hint: Do not use your own phone.)
- You can get too much information, which leads to analysis paralysis (too much information to make a decision).
Quick Tips for Text-based Diaries
You can mitigate these pitfalls by:
- Do not use your own phone. It reduces your interactions. It makes it less personal.
- Keep your texts about the project. Do not encourage communication (example: “Awesome!”, “LOL!”)
- Send automated text reminders rather than personal ones, when possible.
- Collect data using other diary methods (ie paper-based or email)
Method #4: Voice-based Diaries
- Customers can exaggerate their feedback to improve their storytelling.
- The customer story is open to interpretation.
- Richness of verbal feedback may be lost with foreign speakers ( or certain dialects).
- It might be hard to visualize what is being voiced by your customer.
Quick Tips for Voice-based Diaries
You can mitigate these pitfalls by:
- Telling customers to do a paper-based diary along with their voice-based entries.
- All customer stories should have some pictures sent via email (to visualize the context).
- Review a voice-based diary to see if the customer recalls it differently. This is a form of retrospective testing.
- Delay interacting with customers based upon single voice entries. Look for patterns, and then follow-up.
Method #5: Social Media-based Diaries
- Twitter is very interactive, so you can alter their thoughts and actions with your words (or lack or words).
- If you do not respond to a DM, you can get blasted in public. (It can get nasty. Trust me!)
- Some experiences take more than 140 characters to describe.
- Not all participants will be comfortable using Twitter for social media diaries.
- Customers develop Twitter personas, which may not be like their social personalities.
Quick Tips for Social Media-based Diaries
You can mitigate these pitfalls by:
- Use social media diaries for products specifically dealing with social media or targeting digital natives.
- Be sure to include other collection methods (paper-based, email-based, voice-based).
- Avoid (or spot) a Twitter persona by just talking with someone on the phone. It works.
- Keep interactions to Twitter focused on just the projects.
- Schedule tweets as reminders to participants. Check DMs regularly.