Diary Study

When to use:

When wanting to know activities, thoughts and frustrations from users’ perspective.

How to use:

1. Ask users to write a diary about a specific activity or experience over a period of time (from days to months). It can be unstructured (allowing participants to describe their experience the way they prefer) or structured (which provides a set of questions and probes to answer to). It is possible to do it through a printed-out diary or online tools;
2. Small interview to user(s) about the content of the diary;
3. Analyse the information.

Advantages:

- Good method to get highly contextual information;
- Because of its longitudinal nature, is possible to see how and why the documented experience changes;
- The researcher doesn’t need to be present.

Disadvantages:

- All information is self-reported (which can lead to inconveniences such as bias, variance and lack of memory) so, it’s useful to combine it with other methods;
- Time consuming for researcher (setting up a structured diary, waiting for a long time to conduct an interview, analysing the qualitative information).