Dear Diary: Getting started with diary studies

I’ve been giddily blabbering on about diary studies research for a while now - my team can certainly testify to that. We talk a lot about listening and learning from our audience - their needs, experiences, preferences, behaviours, language - and this method embodies that ethos entirely. 

When I tell you that diary studies, despite being longitudinal in its nature, could tell you all of the above with minimal effort from the researcher… would you believe me? 

It’s versatile, unique and it was perfect for uncovering top tasks and user needs for a student intranet redesign. I would even say it’s my favourite tool for carrying out research at the moment. Here’s how to get started with planning and designing your diary study to uncover what you need.

What are diary studies?

Diary studies are a longitudinal research method designed to collect real-time, self-reported experiences, perceptions and behaviours spanning across a specified timeframe. 

Getting the timing right

It can be a study over a week, a month or - if ambitious - a year or more. The timing of your study will depend on what you’re hoping to discover. For example, if you want to gain insight into students’ experiences of arriving at your campus for the first time, you might want to run a study of incoming students during September-October. As this method collects real-time experiences rather than reflective insights, you’ll need to strategically plan the timing of your study to align with your goals. 

Crafting the right questions

Some may say that diary studies offer an abundance of rich qualitative insights - and that’s certainly true - but it can also garner quantitative results too. It’s not surprising given the flexibility of the method. It really lends itself to whatever brief, goal or mystery you’re trying to work through. 

Because of that, it’s vital to set some parameters to guide your study away from chaos and the possibility of overwhelming yourself. Look to why you want to run a diary study and then craft open questions that will allow your audience to answer in a way that is useful to you *and* non-constricting for them. It’s a tricky balance to strike, so here’s a few you could try: 

• What do you need to do today? How did that make you feel? 

• What did you need to find out/search for today? Where did you look?

• What have you heard from the university today?

• What’s been difficult for you today?

• What’s motivated you today?

A good way to think about how we ask questions is to think about whether it’s direct or indirect. Take this for a simplified example. 

Example 1

Q: What do you tend to do on the intranet?

A: I may go there to access my timetable or my emails. 

Example 2

Q: How do you access your emails?

A: I have emails on my phone, so I just check it from there. 

There may be two different answers based on whether you’re asked what tasks you complete on a certain site or how you complete a task. When you take mentions of the site out of the question, you’ll likely find truer behaviours. There are many other ways you could go with this - you may even choose to remove mentions of emails and indirectly track whether this is even a priority task for them at all. Question design is such a skill to master, so be prepared to draft and redraft versions of questions for your diary study to get it right. It’s about being open enough to not lead answers a particular way, but not be so broad that the study doesn’t give you the insights you need.

Knowing when to step back

What we really want from this kind of study is to provide the opportunity for our audience to use their own words to describe their lived experiences. As a researcher, that means stepping back and intervening as little as possible once the study is live. You want to allow the space for your audience’s voices to flow and be heard. You’ll find out how their studies fit naturally into their lives and the barriers and distractions they encounter along the way. 

It’ll take some planning and setting up beforehand, but once it’s underway it practically runs itself with occasional check-ins, follow ups and incentives from you. Replace your title as ‘researcher’ with ‘motivator’ for this one.

And let’s add ‘empowerer’ too. It empowers audiences to speak for themselves and - importantly - feel like they’re being heard by someone who wants to listen. You’re handing over control of the narrative and creating the space for them to tell their stories in their own words. It’s here where you’ll see what’s important in their daily lives. 

When we think about how we can make our campuses more inclusive, it’s really delving deep into the whole spectrum of our audience’s lives to see the emotional context and lived experiences of those who engage with the university where we can start. 

If you’re interested in more tips, you can see my talk at ContentEd 2021 via a post-conference pass plus over 50 other sessions on content strategy and design. Coming up, I’ll also share a step-by-step of how to recruit, conduct and analyse your diary studies. Stay tuned.