Diary Study : Improving the Audio Experience

This article summarise the diary study and its outcomes. The study was conducted by a group of Humber students with an aim to improve the audio experience.

8 min readDec 4, 2018

Challenge

In this ever evolving world and with the emergence of new technologies, it's important for companies to keep providing the best experience to their customers. Otherwise they might lose the customers and hence the business as well. Such was our scenario where the company X found harder to compete in the music stream space. We, as a group were given the task of investigating the audio experiences.

Scenario

Company X provides a music streaming service to its customers. In recent years they have found the space is more crowded and harder to compete in.

You’ve been hired by the client to help them understand people’s current behaviour, emotions, and experiences listening to audio entertainment (e.g., music, podcasts, radio, audiobooks, etc.) so that they can identify gaps and/or improve the experience.

My Role

I collaborated with 5 other Humber students and worked as a UX Researcher. We went on to plan and analyse the study together. Each member including me were given the task to follow up with assigned user at regular intervals.

Understand the Goal

We started out project by defining the high level goal and conducted our study around the same goal. Here’s the goal:

“To learn current behaviors, emotions and experiences of our participants while listening to audio entertainment that can help to identify problems and uncover new opportunities.”

Research Method : Diary Study

A diary study is a research method used to collect qualitative data about user behaviors, activities, and experiences over time.This method helps us to gather the user insights in their own natural environment which is more comfortable for them. The participants are given the task of submitting a response each time they encounter a particular experience(in our case audio experience).

Project Timeline

We started our study by defining the research goal. We also created a study prompt and defined the instructions for the user for the entries. The entire study took 3 weeks. We recruited 6 users and prompted each user to submit at least 3–5 entries each day. We gave 3 days to our participants for submitting the entries.Below is the timeline of our study.

Study Planning

The planning stage started with defining a research question that helped us to create the interview/diary questions later on. Here’s our research question.

“ Research Question: What are users’ motivations and desired outcomes when listening to audio?”

We recruited 6 other students from the class to act as our participants. It was important to create a prompt which can help participants to stay connected to the topic of our study. So after lot of brainstorming within the team we finalised the prompt which is below

“ Prompt: We would like to know what you’re listening to, and how you are listening to it. Please fill out this diary study form whenever you find yourself having an audio listening experience. For the purposes of this diary study, we are interested in purely auditory experiences. (Watching T.V, youtube, videos does not count.)”

Our diary study questions consists of 3 multiple choice questions and 4 open ended questions. We created the questions in a way that we could capture as many insights as possible. Again lot of brainstorming happened before finalizing the questions. To get the responses, we decided to use Google forms as our study tool reason being its easy and convenient for both participants and us. For us a team, it was easy to review and decode the data coming in.

Running The Study

Each group member was given the responsibility of monitoring one participant. During this phase, we monitored the data coming from each assigned participant and also kept an eye on number of responses we were getting each day from each participant. We decided to use Mailchimp(Thanks to our team member Kevin!) to create and send our reminder mails to participant on each day. Before sending them a link to the form, we used to send a mail day before to help them understand about the study and our expectations from them rather than throwing a surprise on the study day. Reminder mails were sent early morning over the course of 3 days.

Screenshot from the mail sent prior to actual study

Analysis

We got around 85% response from our participants(we expected at least 54 entries and got 46) which was still a great number. We got lot of interesting responses from our participants and it was fun to read those. All the responses we got were focused on our prompt so we didn't have to remove any response.

Snippet from our initial post-it note activity for Affinity diagram

Next step was to compile the data/insights in an affinity diagram so that emerging themes could be identified. This activity was done as a group with post-it notes, and later digitized while we reviewed our final themes. To remotely collaborate we used MURAL App for our affinity diagram. Since we got lot of interesting data we didn't want to jump to define our themes in hurry rather we took our time and used mural app to work remotely when needed. After lot of discussion we defined our themes and came up with the below affinity diagram.

Emergent Themes

Emotion Changers and Enhancers: Some of our participants wanted to change an emotion or feeling that they were currently experiencing. Examples were feeling tired in the morning and listening to energizing music to wake them up or to feel happier when feeling sad. We also concluded that participants wanted to enhance certain feelings and emotions. Examples could be scenarios where our participants were feeling relaxed and just wanted to listen to something that kept them in that state and perhaps made them even more relaxed.

Focus: We observed that some of our participants used audio experience to concentrate on other activities mainly assignments. Studying can be tricky at times, some may find it easy but some may need motivation to keep them going. Examples for this could be three of our participants who really wanted to keep going on with their assignment to finish it on time and so they used different audio experiences to achieve this. Some participants were observed listening to their common playlists , while one of the participant was listening to Sad Bastard music which gave us the fare idea that different people tend to use different audio experiences to focus.

Stress Relief: Some people used audio experiences so that they can relieve and reduce stress they get from the world. They said it really helped them to feel better with likable audio, at least when they are listening to it. Like, when people were getting stressed from heavy traffic, they turned on the radio or music. It was actually the easy way to do at the time, and really dispersed the nerves and made them feel relieved.Listening to audio definitely helped some people to get less stressed so they could feel better by loosening the tension and focus on their work.

Reflections: Just like Hollywood movies, sometimes the moments in people’s lives have their own soundtracks too. The audio experiences generate long and lasting emotional impressions and associations that remain perfectly preserved over a lifetime.Many of our diary participants remarked at how often they enjoyed taking these deliberate trips back in time to special moments of their childhood.Whether we realize it or not, we’re assigning personal meaning to audio experiences during our life. The longer the life, the more experiences that can and will happen. And more life experiences makes it more likely that someone will reflect back.

Distraction: It's quiet natural to get distributed from the surroundings and not every time we complain about it, so what to do in that case? Listen to music, good idea! So was the case in our study, some of the participants landed in a situation where they got distracted from their actual work because of the crowd and noisy environment so they end up using audio experience to overcome that. Mostly participants listened to music in this situation.

Passive learning: A popular alternative to music that our participants listened to was podcasts. This audio format includes a wide variety of content including conversations, entertainment, education, interviews, and storytelling (fiction/non-fiction).Our participants were mainly using this audio format to get more educated and informed on news and specific topics that they are interested in. An emerging theme across our participants was a noticeable hunger for learning new things, and oftentimes a podcast session or episode was followed by a positive feeling sparked from the fact that our participant had learned something new.Compared to music, podcasts are a great way to trigger reflective thoughts. Among our participants, these thoughts were described as both positive and negative.

Learnings

This project was a great first in terms of exploring a new research method. There was room for mistakes and learning from those mistakes. I realised the importance of research question and how it can shape the study. I learned how important preparation is, like preparing the questionnaire and also the selection of study tool. Another thing I realised is that not all participants will actively response, so never assume and set the expectations about the participants before the study. Be prepared for any kind of response from participant. Most importantly how to collaboratively work as a team.

I hope that you enjoyed reading the case study as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

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