In a few words (5 min read)
Diary Studies: Extending your UX research
YouTube video from UX Mastery series explaining what is a diary study in UX research. It includes an overview of the whole research process and some practical tips on how to run one.
Step by step (5–30 min read)
Diary Study
More detailed information about the diary study method. Just like other articles from this website, the article is divided into sections: practicalities (timing, needed materials), detailed process description and tips. You can use it as a checklist or a recipe when organizing your first diary study.
How we ran a diary study from within our product
A case study from 99designs on how the design team hacked their way to using Intercom, a customer service messaging software, as their tool for running diary studies.
Deep dive (30 min — few hours read)
Diary Studies: Understanding Long-Term User Behavior and Experiences
An in-depth guide to diary studies with a detailed explanation of the methodology. The text talks both about diary studies’ benefits and the unique challenges connected with time-consuming research method.
Tools
dScout
Recruiting participants for long, in-context research like diary studies used to be a real challenge. Participants were not keen on gruesome, time-consuming task of filling in their diaries. Now thanks to omnipresent smartphones recording your everyday experiences got easier and so did the diary studies. With the help of dscout, you can recruit among 100k+ “scouts” willing to record their experiences via dscout diary study app.
