Diary Study Report — Waiting Experiences of Adult Students
Project Overview
The goal of this project is to gain insight into young adults’ current behaviours, emotions and experiences as they wait. This research was carried out in the form of a Diary Study. For three consecutive days participants were asked to share their waiting experiences. According to the findings participants often use their mobile phones, check out their surroundings and consume media while waiting. Participants’ current situation and outstanding tasks had affected their feelings and thoughts whilst waiting. The participants usually think mostly of what will happen in the next moment, present situation and things they have to do such as school assignments.
Scenario
Organization Y creates educational media for children. They’ve recently decided to expand their user base by creating short educational media for young adults. You and your team have been hired by the company to help them understand people’s current behaviour, emotions, and experiences of waiting (e.g., waiting for a bus, waiting for food, waiting for a friend, etc.). The findings from this research will help them identify ways to improve people’s wait experiences and will help inform both the type of media they create as well as how it’s consumed (e.g., interactive, games, video, articles, etc.)
Research Question
What are the behaviours and emotions that shape people’s waiting experience?
Process Overview
This Diary Study was an in-class group assignment and was divided into four phases.
Phase 1 — Plan Diary Study
The group created their research question that guided them in creating the diary study prompts.
Research Question
What are the behaviours and emotions that shape people’s waiting experience?
After everyone agreed on the research question they formed specific questions to ask the participants. Two multiple choice questions and two open-ended questions were created and all of them were compulsory. Participants were also asked to upload a photograph to depict the waiting experience. This was optional.
Multiple Choice Questions
1. Why were you waiting? Choose all that apply
____ Waiting for a friend/family member/other person
____ Waiting for transportation
____ Waiting for food
____ Waiting for class
____ Waiting for an appointment
____ Waiting for an event/concert
____ Other ________________________________________
2. What were you doing while waiting? Choose all that apply
____Eating/Snacking
____Listening to Music
____Using Mobile Phone
____Watching/Checking out Surroundings
____Reading
____Doing Assignment/Work
____ Other ________________________________________
Open Ended Questions
3. What were you feeling while waiting?
4. What were you thinking while waiting?
Communication with Team Members and Participants
The team created a WhatsApp group for easier communication among themselves. The team also created their own gmail account and used Boomerang to send out automatic reminder emails every morning to the participants when the Diary Study was running.
Format of Diary Study
A Google Form was created to collect entries from the participants. Instructions to the participants were part of the Google Form. For the participants’ convenience, the reminder emails also had instructions and link to the Google Form. To make it easier for the participants they just had to select their names from a list instead of having to type. The picture below shows the instructions in the Google Form. For the sake of privacy the option where the participants can select their names is not shown.
Review of Plan
The instructor had also reviewed the Research Question, Diary Prompts and Instructions. With her recommendations edits were made before the study started to run.
Team Member — Participant Pairing
As there were six participants and five team members one team member was paired with two participants and the others were paired one-to-one. So each team member was responsible to monitor the entry from his/her participant(s) and also to remind his/her participant(s) to make entries for the day.
Phase 2 — Run Study
The participants were asked to make 3–5 diary entries per day for 3 days from 9th December, 2017 (Saturday) to 11 December, 2017 (Monday). As the team had deadlines for completing certain phases of the project they ensured that they included at least one day when the participants will have a class; according to the scenario this project was created for a company that created educational media. It was also good to have entries on a weekend as well so that this can offer a richer insight into the experience of the participants.
Phase 3 -Analysis
Team members would have been reviewing the entries as they were monitoring. The team used the graphs from Google Form as it provided an automatic tabulation to the multiple choice questions. The following pictures show the automatic creation of charts by Google Form.
According to the chart above most participants made entries whilst waiting for food. Waiting for a friend/family member/other person and waiting for transportation were also common reasons why participants waited. The participants had no class on weekends so they only waited for class on Monday.
According to the chart above participants mostly used their mobile phones whilst waiting. The other two popular activities were checking out surrounding and listening to music.
Creation of Themes
For more in-depth analysis of data the team created an affinity diagram. As there were many entries from the study the team colour coded the sticky notes in the affinity diagram by questions. The team then brainstormed to seek for pattern and group the sticky notes.Then themes were suggested. They reviewed entries from the diary study to cross-check their themes. The following pictures shows the group working together to create the affinity diagram.
Phase 4 — Report
Reports were then created from the Diary Study. This blog entry is one such report.
Themes
Planning Around School
Many of the participants thought of things related to classes, for example assignments, team-mates and in-class activities. When comparing the weekend to Monday for one participant it was noticed that even though the participant thought of assignments during the weekend his thoughts on assignments increased on Monday as he was actually more engaged in doing assignments and also thought more of the assignments. It was also noticed based on the diary entry he seemed more relaxed on the weekend as compared to the Monday. Common thoughts on school were thinking about current assignments, thinking about new assignment, current class activities and team mates.
Thoughts of the Future
Whether it was thinking about what to do next, what to do for the next few days or what to do during school break the participants definitely thought of the future. Many participants would think of what will happen in the next moment, for example, whether it will be about the actual activity they are waiting for (example, thinking of moves while playing table tennis or how tasty the food will be) or what situation they will be in next ( example, wondering how crowded the bowling alley will be). They also thought about the future in terms of planning assignments, the day or holiday.
Ambivalence in Decision Making
Based on present situation there were times when the participants had conflicting thoughts when it came to decision making. For example, a participant was trying to decide whether to walk or take the bus because it was cold; another participant was feeling frustrated by a long line in the store and was contemplating on whether he should return another day. There were other less frustrating thoughts, like a participant was debating whether to share his dessert or have all to himself.
Concerned about Health and Wellness
There were times when participants were thinking about factors that will affect their health. For example, one participant who was ill was wondering when he would get better and another was thinking about how the cold can affect his injured knee. Another participant was feeling tired and was thinking about not having enough sleep.
Internet and Media to Distract
The use of mobile phone was a popular activity participants engaged in whilst waiting. Another popular choice was listening to music and some also watching videos whilst waiting. In some entries the participants specifically mentioned that the music or video helped with their moods and put their thoughts off waiting.
Live in the Moment
Whilst waiting many participants checked out their surroundings. Apart from using media, some also utilized other items in the environment. Example, chatting, eating snacks while waiting for food and checking out the menu.
Reflection
What did I learn?
As this was my first time doing a Diary Study I definitely learnt a lot. The following are some main points that I learnt.
- Even though the diary study ran for only three days making 3–5 entries per day eventually started to be a bit tiresome for the participants. So keeping the questions to a minimum is the better approach. It was great that the instructor advised us to do this.
- The Google Form proved to be a very helpful tool because we could quickly create accessible diary prompts from there. It tabulated the data and also captured information such as timing.
- Boomerang was a great tool for sending automatic email reminders. This proved useful as the team members did not always have to think of waking up early morning to send an email reminder every day to their participants.
- Pairing up team members with participants also proved effective as this provided smoother communication with the team and participants. The automatic reminder emails alone were not sufficient as reminders.
- Through a WhatsApp Group the team was able to remotely work together especially when the diary prompt questions were being created. Sometimes ideas came to the participants’ minds at different times so messaging in the group was a fast way to share thoughts, get back feedback and make update to the project. So this helped to add to the quality and richness in the project.
- Pictures from the Diary Study entries proved very useful as they gave a better insight into what the participant was experiencing.
What would I do differently next time?
- Next time I would start documenting the report as soon as I finish creating the affinity diagram. If documentation starts earlier memory is clearer and this can help greatly with wording the report. Later would require diving back into the memory and this can cause wording reports to take longer.
- To gain richer insights maybe if a similar study is carried out would also run the study for more weekdays as well. This can lead to having a better comparison to the participants’ waiting experience during weekend as opposed to week days.
- Because this assignment was an in-class assessment and the participants were classmates there was no issue in putting participants’ first names to select from in the Google Form for mapping participants to entries. However, in an actual Diary Study it would be wiser to use nicknames in the list the participant would select from so as to keep the other participants in the study unaware of who the other participants might be.
Thank you for reading.
Kind regards,
Shafeeza — a UX student at Humber College and one of the team members who worked on this Diary Study.