Tips for how to plan and conduct a Diary Study research project (Guide)

Category: Mobile Diary Study

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Exploratory research is all about getting under the skin of customers and users in their every day lives. It’s about virtually walking in their shoes and seeing the world as they see it. It’s about understanding their real world contexts and what influences how they act, feel and behave in-the-moment. It’s about adding depth, colour and vitality to faceless segmentations, user personas, analytics and metrics.

One of the most powerful methods of discovery user research is the remote Diary Study. For some, it’s the richest, most intimate and contextual type of exploratory research method there is. Great design starts with deep understanding and a longitudinal diary study is a powerful, non invasive and cost effective research method that our customers are increasingly embracing to deepen their empathy and improve their customer and user experience.

Modern, mobile first Diary Study apps enable Researchers, Designers & Brands to remotely experience - like never before - contextual, in-the-moment behaviors, emotions and experiences that help them better understand the everyday lives and unmet, unarticulated needs of their users and customers. Because Diary Studies are an asynchronous research method, researchers can use Diary Studies to discover repetitive behaviors, routines and habits. Instead of relying on recall or memory which can typically occur in Focus Groups or Interviews. Furthermore, the asynchronous nature of Diary Studies and in-the moment insights they surface, offer a more rich, and organic insight into your target personas.

There is both an art and a science to conducting a longitudinal Diary Study. In this article we are going to explore, at a high level, how to go about planning and running your next remote Diary Study research project.

What type of research can Diary Studies be used for?

A remote Diary Study is an extremely flexible and agile methodology that can be used in any sector at any stage of your innovation or design life cycle. They make up around 50% of the projects that are carried out on our platform and are very much the “bread and butter” of our and our clients’ business.

Our clients use Diary Studies for multiple research scenarios:

Consumption video diary studies,
Day-in-the-life (DILO) or week-in-the-life diary studies that bring their personas / quant segmentations to life
Product usage studies
Remote user research
Mobile usability research
Understanding daily routines and needs in the workplace
Figuring out their path to purchase or capturing online and in-store (omnichannel) shopping behavior
Mapping Customer Journeys
Capturing your customers’ experience and much, much more.

The Planning guide below is designed to give you a framework on how to plan a Diary Study. In addition to providing you with a Diary Study app and a Researcher Dashboard to carry out your research remotely, we also provide you with a design and strategy service to help you maximise the capabilities of our platform to achieve your research objectives and/or fulfil your client’s brief.

If you’re new to Diary Studies, we will completely de-risk your adoption of this powerful research methodology. We take a concierge approach to every relationship and, should you work with us, you can rely on our team to hold your hand at every step of your mobile study journey from scoping to task design to project set up and ongoing support to ensure a frictionless user experience for you, your clients and your participants.

Define your Diary Study research objectives

Let’s be honest here: we all have blind spots when it comes to truly understanding our target audience. I think Rummy said it better than anyone…

Source : Donald Rumsfeld Unknown Unknowns !

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

As with any project, the first thing you must put in place before launching your remote Diary Study is a set of research objectives - what are you trying to achieve here (or do we have any idea of what the customer really needs / does)?

These should not be tied to the outcome of the study but rather to the questions that you want answered. The goals should be about ensuring coverage across all of the current challenges and blindspots or questions unanswered in your brief.

If your Diary Study is at the very start of your innovation lifecycle, then the chances are you are not entirely sure what you should be asking. This is perfectly ok. In fact, the most successful discovery diary studies we supported to date started with wide open tasks and iterated into the findings from there using agile, scheduled tasking (this requires a whole other post in itself).

Keep the goals simple and the tasks open ended.

Some examples of goals might be:

Understanding food or beverage occasions over the course of a week
Tracking consumer beauty / grooming routines over a period of 2 weeks (and do they differ on weekends versus weekdays)?
Keeping a diary of what consumers shop for on mobile over the course of a week (and how)?
Understanding a week in the life of a sports fan (and specifically their match day experiences)?
Doing remote user research on small business owners and how they maintain their financial accounts
Doing exploratory UX research on peoples fitness routines and their use of apps and devices for fitness.
What does a week in the life of an Electric Vehicle owner really look like?
Recording what it’s like for a patient to live with a medical condition and the impact of diet or medication on the patient’s condition.
Understanding Gen-Z media consumption (what are they watching, on what platform, when and why)?

Additional Capabilities

In addition to Video Surveys, you can also do the following with Indeemo:

• Recruit Participants in hours

Recruit B2C and B2B participants in hours from a panel of 3 million+ Respondents.

• Speed up analysis with Generative AI

Use Generative AI prompts for summarisation, translation, thematic analysis, sentiment analysis etc. and reduce analysis time by at least 40%.

• Analyse Interviews and IDIs

Import your interviews from Zoom, Microsoft Teams or your computer, transcribe them in 27 languages and analyse them fast with Generative AI.

Learn more

Setting goals allows us to have a stable framework on which to base the study - it focuses the client and the team on the right objectives and ensures that the tasking follows a coherent strategy.

If you’re geared up for it, a truly agile diary study can start off with the relatively vague goal of getting a more contextual understanding of user behavior. Embrace the unknown unknowns! Gather a few days worth of data, quickly synthesize what’s going on and then add tasks as you go based on the trends you are seeing.

Scheduled tasking is great for this agile approach where you’re tasking on the fly based on what you’re learning. (Contact us if you’d like to learn more about this approach).

Speak to an Expert

How many research participants do you need for a Diary Study?

There is no simple answer to this question unfortunately. It varies depending on what you need to do. However, there are some simple rules of thumb that you can follow.

If you are only focused on one consumer segment or user persona, we advise that you avoid having less than 10 research participants in total for any Diary Study. Any number below this means that your sample is quite shallow and any no shows will have a big impact on the volume of data you can collect.

On the upper end however, you need to consider the volume of data that will be collected, especially if you are focusing heavily on video. Once you go beyond 40 or 50 participants, you need to weigh up the incremental learning against the analysis time required. In reality, you will be under time pressure and with some much data, the chances are you won’t have time or your client won’t have budget to cover proper analysis of the insights.

If you are researching multiple user personas, then we advise that you always have a minimum of 6-8 / persona. Typically studies would be in the region of 10-30 participants where 2-4 user personas or consumer segments are being researched.

How do you recruit research participants for a Diary Study?

If there’s only one thing you take away from this post, it’s the absolute necessity to recruit the right participants, screen them rigorously and incentivize them realistically.

No matter how much you think your super users love your product or service, you’re competing for their attention.

We can tell within 12 hours which projects are not paying participants enough and which ones are: the metrics never lie.

Poor incentive = 20% registration rates.

Proper incentive = 90% completion rates!

Scrimping on incentives is a false economy. The time you spend chasing them to even sign up will quickly cost you more than paying them a realistic incentive.

The second task is to make sure you are getting the right people for the study. This is not just about getting people who are willing to take part, it is about getting a good representative group, who fit your target demographic or segmentation and who are going to provide you with genuine insight.

Participants must be properly incentivised

Paying a realistic incentive will have a massive impact on engagement and completion rates

Your Recruitment Strategy should have three component parts -

Recruiting participants for your Diary Study research

Whether you are using a Recruiter, a Field Agency, your database, client CRM or simply going out onto social media and finding participants yourself, you should be looking for the persona or personas that fit with the brief. It is critical that you either brief this to the Recruiter or have signals that help you discover the right persona in your own search.

We recommend that the minimum number of participants you have per segment / persona is 8 - 10. Quantity is not as important as quality, but you don’t want to go to shallow with your numbers either. Don’t make up the numbers with just any respondent. Get the right people.

We strongly recommend you work with a recruiter who personally sources, screen and manages the participants. Although it might stretch your budget, the impact proper recruitment has on the success of your project is huge. Our data consistently confirms this.

2. Incentivise your Diary Study participants realistically

Pay, pay well and pay smart. We’ve supported hundreds of diary studies. We know what works well and what doesn’t. We have a raft of data on incentives and our strategists are happy to discuss incentives over a call to help you find the sweet spot for your incentive strategy in terms of pricing.

Proper screening of diary study participants is critical. We strongly recommend you get your recruiter to screen them by phone.

Every type of study has one, and we have the data to guide you. Sometimes, paying is not enough by itself though. Sometimes, especially on longer duration longitudinal diary studies, you need to gamify it a bit. Create a target. Offer them a prize. You might look at paying a bonus for completing all of their tasks or a discretionary prize for the best respondent / uploads. The key here is to maximise your return on incentives and see them as a tool and not a necessary evil. Again, we can expand further on a strategy call if you do choose to go ahead with a study.

3. Be transparent on what research participants must do to get paid for their Diary Study

Indeemo has found that ensuring the participants are comfortable with the technology and informed as to what is expected of them ahead of the study, is key to a study’s success. Our on-boarding experience is extremely comprehensive and easy to use, but whatever technology you use, make sure the respondents are well prepared ahead of the study.

When you recruit them, be very explicit on the following:

What the purpose of the study is
What you need them to do
How long it will last and how often they need to engage
How much time it will take them to complete their tasks
How much they will get paid and when

Ensuring participants are aware of what they need to do and clearly briefing them up front (ideally by phone during the recruitment phase) will ensure that they “buy in” to your study. This also gives you the moral high ground” when it comes to chasing the ones who are slow to get up and running.

Check out our Diary Study Tool

How long should a Diary Study last?

Diary studies come in all shapes and sizes. Depending on what you need to understand, where and when, diary studies can be as short as 1 day or can be as long as 12 months.

On average however, most of the diary studies we support are between 7 and 10 days long. Depending on your use case, the window of your study will vary:

Looking to understand a day-in-the-life? Allow for 3 days: 1 day to get everyone up and running the app, 1 full focused day for a remote diary study tasking and 1 day to allow some stragglers to complete.
Need to understand a week in the life, allow 9-10 days again to get respondents registered and up and running and then allow yourself a full “clean” week of data capture so you understand what a full week looks like.
Considering a long term, longitudinal diary study? We have some studies that have been ongoing for up to 2 years. On these studies, screening and incentives are critical to ensure respondents stay the course and cadence is key. You won’t be able to get respondents to engage daily for very long - hence you need to establish a rhythm and a cadence that gets respondents into a groove. Getting this right is complex and hard to cover without jumping on a call to understand the context and the objectives of the study.

What are the best questions or tasking strategies for Diary Studies?

Tasking is such a critical part of the process that we could devote a whole post to it and still not cover all of the nuances. Getting your tasking right is critical to the success of your remote diary study. We’ve done hundreds of diary studies and our strategists will guide you through the process of choosing the right taking strategy and optimising your discussion guide / list of tasks for mobile.

At a high level you have three different types of tasking you can avail of -

All At Once Tasking - This is where the tasks are delivered to the respondent in one go, right at the start of the dairy study. This is often the preferred methodology where the timing or sequence of tasks isn’t that important. It gives the respondent a fuller view of what the project is trying to uncover from them and it gives them the flexibility to do tasks when it’s convenient for them.
Scheduled Tasking - This means that the tasks are released to the respondent at a pre-defined date and time. This is powerful when you want to maximise the in-the-moment capabilities of Diary Studies. Respondents get a push notification alert when a task goes live and can then respond in the moment which maximises the contextuality and immediacy of their reaction. If you need to understand respondent needs or behaviors at particular times e.g. launching a dinner shopping task at 4pm or asking them what they are watching right now, scheduled tasking allows researchers to really experience their respondents in the moment.
Sequential Tasking - This process releases tasks only when the last one has been completed. This is much more of a customer journey project tool. It allows the researcher to have much more control over the journey of the respondent

diary-study-app — “Ideally, a task should never be longer than a Tweet”

Eugene Murphy, Founder, Indeemo.

Here are some key tips in how to write your tasks -

Remember the medium.
The respondents will be seeing these tasks on their mobile phones. The screen of their phone is much smaller than the desktop you are typing your tasks on, so be mindful of how much scrolling it might take for respondents to actually read your task. So, keep it short and succinct - ideally a task should never be longer than a tweet. Respondents will have to remember the questions you have asked them while recording that video or uploading that photo, so don’t ask too many questions per task. Instead look to ask a maximum of three questions per task. e.g. Record your Monday morning shaving routine. What time is it? Tell us about what razor you are using? Tell us about the products you are using?
Diary Study tools..
… have a multitude of ways to help your respondents answer these questions - video, photo, text, screen recording - make sure to choose the right response type for the respondent when setting each tasks. Sometimes videos are essential. Other times, photos might suffice.
Use normal, natural language…
… that is going to resonate with the actual study participants as well, i.e. don’t be too scientific in your language here. You want them to see you as a real person not a faceless researcher wearing a white coat in some lab somewhere). Embedding a selfie video of yourself in the intro to your Diary Study has a huge impact on building rapport with respondents and keeping it personal. Don’t overthink these questions, keep the language and tone natural and make it simple.

What is the best way to engage with diary study participants?

What makes Diary Studies truly unique is the asynchronous method. Instead of relying on recall and a short interview window, Diary Studies allow you to see what the respondents do repetitively do over a longitudinal time period.

This allows for more time to analyze the real-time responses and can help start a dialogue with the respondent with probing. Probing is where you, the researcher can ask questions of the respondent in real-time and drill down on what they have shared with you.

Probing is a critical element in the success of an agile, remote diary study. Going back to Rummy’s “unknown unknowns”, the reality is you have no idea of what journey respondents will take you during a diary study. So keeping your diary study interactive and conversational using comments and probes is an agile way to follow the insights and dig deeper into what you are observing. Modern, mobile diary study apps have several tools including real time alerts and 1-1 commenting that allows contextual, in-the-moment probing to happen naturally. This allows you to get right into the moment with your respondents. Make use of this capability!

Ask why.

Ask them to elaborate.

Ask them to think about their response and qualify it.

Be indeemoment!

How to analyse and present data for your Diary Study report

Finally, the key to a successful study is about how you present it. While reports are typically presented in PowerPoint or Keynote, supplementing your presentations with access to the raw data can be immensely valuable when it comes to building empathy with your users and customers. Enabling your clients or internal stakeholders to view participant uploads in an interactive dashboard can be impactfully valuable.

Supplementing your de-briefs with an in-platform drill down can really bring the personas and the data to life. Platforms with Observer logins that enable clients to see but not engage directly with respondents really move the needle in this regard.

Indeemo enables you to do just that.

Indeemo has been created to allow you present your Diary Study findings in various, media rich ways. You can walk in the shoes of an individual respondent and follow their journey. You can create visual collages that instantly communicate a particular task or respondent or theme. Timeline capabilities enable you to understand and communicate how trends developed over the course of the study. Social networking style tools enable you to follow the in-the-moment dialogue between researchers and participants. Keyword tools and automated video transcription can drastically cut down the amount of time it takes to analyse and present the data.

There is a life and a depth to a Mobile Study that static slides can sometimes struggle to convey. Presenting the insights of your remote diary study in-platform has the capability of vividly bringing your user - and their context - to life in a way that other methodologies cannot.

Let our Diary Study tools and research platform support your next research project

If you’re struggling to truly understand the needs of your users or you are drowning in segmentations and analytics but still have no idea of who the people behind the pie charts really are, then a Diary Study can be a powerful way to augment and enrich your existing data and understanding.

Studies can be activated in days and are extremely cost effective.

If you’d like to discuss your particular requirements or brief with one of our strategists, get in touch now.

We’ve supported hundreds of studies. We will quickly be able to propose a solution that will work for you.