Why?

Report detailed information about routines and long-term experience.

How?

Ask users to keep a diary over a period of time and report about their personal experience regarding your topic of interest. It’s possible to ask users to report about activities, feelings or frustrations.

Ingredients

• A representative small group of participant (5-10).
• A well prepared diary with daily reporting exercises and instructions for a description about how participants on how they should need to report about the tasks.
• The report can be a mix of writings, photos, videos and/or audio recordings.

In practice

In one diary study users were asked to review some kind of app or device to see how it fitted their habits. Diary studies are also useful for insights in the user experience of services that take multiple days or weeks to complete, like planning and booking a holiday.

Useful resources

• Universal methods of design (Martin & Hannington , 2012) spend a couple of pages about diary studies. In the Dutch version: chapter 30, p66-67
• There is a good chapter on Diary Studies, in Observing the User Experience (Goodman, Kuniavsky, Moed, 2012). Chapter 9, p211-241