Diary Research

Diary research helps you to see customer experiences over time. Gathering insights from participants in a natural environment ensures that you see realistic behaviour as it occurs.

Why Should You Conduct Diary Research?

Diary studies can be a crucial tool for gathering insights from users over a longer period of time. This could be to track their experience over multiple use sessions or to see how their behaviour changes over time. Our diary studies provide you with:

  • Real-time feedback. See how users interact with your product within their typical daily routines
  • Reduced bias as participants do not have to recall thoughts or behaviour
  • Deep insights across your product, including prioritised recommendations

How Does It Work?

The specifics of each diary test are unique and tailored to your project. However, the overall process is based around the following steps:

  1. We work with you to discuss the objectives and participants for the research. Our specialist partners then recruit according to your individual criteria. Alternatively, if you have a panel of users you want to test with, we can use these for the research.
  2. We conduct the research. The length of the diary study may vary depending on your objectives and aims for the project. Participants will log their experiences over time through the most suitable platform platforms (social media, email, physical journals etc) and at the end of the research period these diaries are sent to us.
  3. We review and analyse the findings from the diaries. After this, we provide you with a concise and actionable report. Detailed but easy to consume, these reports contain prioritised recommendations and participant quotes.

When Should You Conduct Diary Research?

Diary studies can be used at different stages of development, for different purposes. At the start of a project they could be used to understand the use-case more clearly, or to find out more about users’ typical behaviour.

They can also be used further in development to assess user experience with your product over a longer period of time. This can help to look at retention of the user and find ways to improve on this.

To make it as easy as possible to run a diary study, users can record their data via many different platforms. Also, we work with international partners to conduct research over-seas. This combination helps to ensure that practical issues don’t prevent you from hearing from the most relevant users.

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