Sitting at the centre of product development or improvements to existing products or services, is user experience. UX has become a prominent and critical part of design and development. The essence of UX puts customers, and users of your product or service, at the intersection of decision making throughout various stages of the product life cycle - particularly during the initial phases of your development project. Nonetheless, it is not uncommon for projects to fail - or at the very least, miss the mark on specific functionalities of a product - as a result of a poor understanding of the user experience.

When we set out on a new project, there needs to be a direct link between the user/customer, designers, developers, and the specs and functionalities required for the life span of the project. Without this link, we risk commencing a project that is mostly, if not completely, misaligned with the needs of the user. As internal stakeholders, designers and developers, why do we require a thorough understanding of our users?

The Importance of researching Users for UX Design and Development

When projects get underway more often than not, the business requirements, technological requirements, and user requirements are all brought to the table. Internal stakeholders will provide insights into the proposed outcome of the project. From the perspective of UX, when, or if, the voice of customers/users are not embraced then we risk the project kicking off on the wrong foot.

The aim is to avoid adding precious time on to a project, and extending it with little or no time to go to the projected market release date. Without a deep understanding of the users needs, we risk developing the wrong solution, resulting in a ‘reset and redo’ of the project. This can often result in an increase in costs and resources. To be more clear and concise, at the beginning of a project, our scope and objective need to be defined, focused, and guided by what it is we know about our users. UX Discovery, or user discovery, helps us achieve this focus by providing valuable insights into our customers lives. So, what is UX Discovery?

What is UX Discovery Research?

UX discovery research, although often referred to as UX discovery or User Discovery, in fact involves a range of insights gathering. This often involves reviewing what is already known about competitors' products that are in the market, building a knowledge base of what internal stakeholders believe to be the right requirements for the project, and outlining assumptions to name a few. A deep and comprehensive understanding of users is often the most important element of UX discovery. It is this component, through user research, that often provides us with the most valuable insights for our project.

Not every project will follow the same protocol during the discovery phase. That said, the objective will be the same. That is, to understand what is the current state of the user experience, what problems are our users facing, how can our user research provide guidance and direction for the following phases of our project, and can our team reach a shared understanding of the user? This is where we can significantly reduce the risks of designing the wrong solutions, and minimise the risk of adding more time and money to our project.

To do this, there are many types of methodologies and techniques we can adopt for an effective user research strategy for the UX discovery of our project. One of the leading tools and techniques for UX discovery is a diary study/diary study tool. Because UX diary research aims to capture unknowns about our users, and provide insights to help us identify problems, it is often viewed as a right fit to achieve these goals.

What is a UX Diary Study Tool?

Diary studies are not a newcomer to user research methodologies. In fact, a diary study is one of the more common qualitative research methods applied to dig deep into human life and experiences. A traditional approach to a diary study involves the use of pen and paper. To simply put it, research participants either make end of day diary entries or complete diaries at specific times during the day to document their behaviour and experiences with a certain phenomenon or event.

A diary study tool facilitates all of this, but through the use of mobile and digital technology. Ultimately, these tools leverage mobile technology, particularly smartphones, and by doing so, research participants can access their diary app via their phone. What happens next is straightforward. User researchers will log predefined tasks that are specific to uncovering insights about participants. Whether scheduled, in sequences, or released all at once, research participants will be notified when a task is due to be completed.

Simply, users/customers will begin to document their daily lives, interactions with your product, or behaviours across various touchpoints of a user journey, and upload these via their diary study app. Once uploaded, the insights will be ready for analysis. This process in conjunction with the technological characteristics of a diary study speeds up field work time. But, how does the tool help bridge the gap between UX discovery and design?

How Diary Studies can be used as a tool for Discovery Research

There are a number of ways a UX diary study tool can help strengthen project focus. The most notifiable and valuable way it can do this is by helping us identify problems that need to be addressed. With UX discovery, we aim to explore the lives of our users. This allows us to uncover their needs, understand their experiences with a product or service in a real-world context, with empathy building as a driving force for guidance in the design process.

What are the benefits of a diary study?

Understanding New User Personas vs Existing User Personas

We often have clients meet with us to discuss their user research needs. A common aim for researchers is to be able to identify personas. User personas play a central role in user-centred design. Personas directly help us segment users based on various characteristics. These characteristics are not just demographics, but more importantly, they are the attributes that describe a user persona relative to how they perceive a product, interact with specific functionality, how they behave at various touch points, and what channels they flow through on their user journey.

Whilst user personas are often thought of as created or “fictional”, they are undoubtedly informed directly from the user themselves, i.e. the human. When we apply a diary study methodology, we are integrating qualitative data into our UX discovery phase of the project. Both qualitative and quantitative methods can be applied to user research, however, if we are unsure about who the users are, then a qualitative approach should always be the optimal methodological approach.

Having a UX diary tool as part of our UX discovery research toolkit, there are two key outcomes that commonly appear in the qualitative insights. First, we are able to capture new and unknown insights about our current personas. This can often be overlooked as user personas are not static. In fact, they are dynamic. Human behaviour can change, and when we adopt UX diary study, we are able to compare and contrast past behaviours with new ones. This allows us to review and update our current user persona characteristics.

Second, there is always the possibility that we uncover characteristics previously unknown to us. The emergence of a new user persona can often be a result of this. When research participants begin making diary entries, we will instantly capture insights. These insights are underpinned by context. Context relating to their own natural environment, their relationships, their perceptions, and their own unique experiences online and offline. It is important to not leave personas on the shelf. What do we mean by this? As mentioned above, user personas are both dynamic and built around real human experiences and behaviours. As they are dynamic, this means that little or many varying factors can influence changes in human behaviour. We not only like to view the insights that emerge from a UX diary study as the foundations for design, but also the core data points that help us identify user personas.

Building User Empathy Across the Product Team

Product or service design should always be insights driven. With user-centred design, we rely heavily on the insights that come from our discovery phase of a project. With the ux research we conduct, there will be a wealth of data that comes directly from the users perspective. Ensuring that our research participants do not feel overwhelmed by the tasks they receive, human insights will drive design decisions effectively and the insights can be referred back to as we build out our project. When users commence their own diaries they will feel a sense of empowerment. With that comes a wealth of information. As far as the design phase of the project is concerned, we will be in a stronger position to develop the right project that will solve problems that we know exist amongst our users and their real life experiences. 

Collating the insights from our research participants gives us a deeper understanding of the user needs, and with that, we are in a stronger position to share this across teams internally. The result is a shared sense of understanding for the users of our product. It puts the voice of the customer first, and our project is driven by their needs.

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We’ve supported thousands of research projects covering everything from mapping the path to purchase for aquarium filters to mortgage buyer journeys to mapping the patient journey of kidney transplant patients.

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