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Last night was the first of a new regular meetup for UX researchers in London, covering diary studies. Kindly organised by Jeff Van Campen and hosted by Fortune Cookie, it went really well. It’s great that with all of the other meetups that focus on aspects of design, we now have one that balances that by looking at research too!

There were three speakers (including me), and between the three of us we covered the theory and early practice underpinning the method, alternative approaches such as digital diaries, and also a case study. The first part was discussed by Boon Chew (“Diary studies – a primer”), then I reviewed the pros and cons of paper and digital approaches (“Hi-fi or lo-fi”). Finally, Beth Duddy talked through a really interesting case study on using Posterous for a diary.

I think we all agreed that it’s surprising this method isn’t used more in industry, particularly given the many different ways you can now implement a diary. Hopefully this event will go some way to encouraging it’s use.

There was a really good fishbowl Q & A session at the end, and a few interesting themes came up. There was some good discussion initially on when it would be appropriate to use the method. When specifically would you use it? Are there situations where you wouldn’t see a diary as appropriate?

My response to these questions was that I tended to use diaries primarily when I wanted some qualitative research but the behaviour I wanted to observe happened intermittently, or was difficult to observe directly for whatever reason. So for example I’m planning a diary study now of how people think about and plan holidays. This is an activity that happens across digital and non-digital channels, in different locations, at different times, with different people. In practical terms this is impossible to observe directly, and interviews cause problems because participants need to recall thoughts and behaviour from weeks or months prior to the interview. The opposite to this is that if the behaviour I’m interested in is directly observable, then I’d usually do that first. From that I might be able to assess whether a diary study would add further value.

It was all really good discussion, and there were clearly people in the audience who had as much if not more experience of running diary studies than the speakers. There were also some great contributions in the form of sketchnotes by at least a couple of the attendees. If there’s anything else from the event I’ve missed, do leave me a comment and I’ll update the post.

Here’s my presentation from the evening, make sure to check the slide notes! I tend not to put much in the slides themselves…

Diary studies: Alternative approaches

 

Will Myddelton provided some great sketchnotes on Boon’s presentation, mine, and Beth’s. Eva-Lotta Lamm also drew this great set.

I’ll add Beth’s presentation here too as soon as it become available.

I’d love to hear about others thoughts diary studies and different ways they’ve been used…