Diary Studies
Diary Studies
In Human-Computer Interaction, a diary study is a qualitative technique for collecting data on what users have done or experienced. Much like a travel journal contains descriptions of the traveler’s experiences, a UX diary contains descriptions of the user’s experiences with a system.
A diary study is a daily log of activities, behaviors that you get a user to keep over an extended period of time. You might get users to take photos to explain their activities and highlight things that stood out to them across the course of their day. I prefer this photo method as you gain better insight into the users’ mind-set than words alone generally offer.
Overview of the Project
Diary Study use a collection of tools, artifacts, and tasks intended to provoke the user into thinking about their environment in new ways and can gain insights into participants’ environments that will help identify problems and uncover new opportunities.
We, UX students, were given the task to gain insights into participants’ experiences, using Diary Studies that can help to identify problems and uncover new opportunities in the respective project.
Students were divided into team of 5–6 members. A scenario was presented. Students went through the whole process of the research, from planning, data collecting, analyzing to presenting the results. And the final deliverable i.e. reflections of this project was in the form of blog post.
Scenario for Diary Study : Waiting experiences
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’ve been hired by the company to help them understand people’s current behavior, 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 Process
1. Planning
First of all, as it is a group project, me and my team thought of different ideas to come up with a good research question. Our goal was to understand emotions as well as behaviors of people while waiting.
Browsing different ideas, we came up with:
Research Question: What behaviors and emotions do people experience while waiting?
When a long wait ends on a happy note, we tend to look back on it positively, even if we were miserable much of the time.
Waiting in queues can elicit powerful emotions in us. Stress. Boredom. The nagging sensation that one’s life is slipping away. And ofcourse we believe that the other line moves faster.
Secondly, we determined the details of the study, including participants, length of running the study, frequency of entry submission, the prompts, instructions and all the questions.
- Participants: Seven adults (age 22–40) were recruited directly from the class (classmates) for this study.
- Length: This diary study run for 3 days.
- Frequency: Participants were asked to submit an entry every time they’re waiting. Each participant was asked to submit 3–5 entries per day.
- Instruction & prompts: The questions for participants include both 2 multiple choice questions (reasons of waiting and activities while waiting and how long they have been waiting for) and one open-ended and one close-ended question (asking their feelings and thoughts respectively). Participants were also encouraged to submit photographs to depicting their waiting experience.
- A google form was set up as an entry form for participants to fill out.
- Reminder: By using a Gmail-based plug-in (Boomerang), automatic recurring emails were also set up to send reminders to participants once a day for three days.
Finally, before the formal launch of the study, we decided each member’s responsibilities while the study is running. Each of group member was assigned one participant to monitor and communicate with, as needed. All technologies using in the study (google forms, recurring emails) were also tested to ensure they all function well prior to the real study.
2. Running Study
Once the study formally launched, a URL link of the Google entry form was sent out to all participants. All group members can also access to the online form to review participant’s responses.
After the study started, I contacted my participant to make sure she understands the instruction as well as the questions properly and knows how to contact me if she has questions. During the 3-day study period, I kept tracking the responses from my participant at least three times every day. Reviewing all her entries, I took notes for inappropriate or unclear responses. I would also remind the participant personally of submitting more entries if she didn’t meet the minimal requirement (3 entries) of everyday submission.
3. Analyzing data
a) Reviewing the data
At this phase, I reviewed all the responses for two multi-choices questions (reasons of waiting and what activities were done while waiting), confirmed the entries and fixed some double answers. I also analyzed all responses for open-ended and close-ended questions, making sure all the entries are submitted with appropriate answers.
b) Analyzing data with charts
Having the data filtered, I created a bar-chart for two multi-choices questions to present the patterns across participants. As can be seen from the Figure 1.2, the most frequent reason for waiting is waiting for food, either for food to be cooked or ordering food from outside. Figure 1.3 are two photographs submitted by our participants depicting these moments. The second and third main reasons of waiting include waiting for a friend/family member.
3.3 Affinity diagramming
In order to better identify the themes and similarity in the data, especially from those open-ending questions, we as a group conducted affinity diagramming to further analyze the data. First, we put out all the data entries on post-it notes and sort out by themes.
Once all the post-it notes are created, we took turns and posted each note to a blank poster. When there were duplicated entries, we combined them together. When there are similar ones, we clustered them. During the period of sorting, we kept discussion and tried to identify emerging patterns in the submitted entries.
Because we have had the statistical results for the reasons of waiting (Figure 2), we basically sorted them based on their frequency. Similarly, we also sorted their activities based on the frequency (as shown in Figure 1.5).
Talking about emotions, we identified a full chart of the emotional status. Therefore, we sorted all emotions based on negative and positive emotions.
Large amount of time was spent in grouping the participants feedback to set a pattern. Rearranging the entries to set a pattern was defined after a long debate among the group members. The final output consisted of several themes which can also be placed on the timeline.
At the same time, these themes can be placed on a timeline in form of past-present-future, adding one more dimension to the diagram.
The following figure is the final poster we created.
We also created a high-fidelity version of the affinity diagram as follows. In the following version, due to the limited space, not all raw data points were included, only some of the representative data points were selected to present.
Key Themes and Reflections:
Attitudes and Behaviours Towards Waiting
VIEWING
The act of viewing emerged as a major theme, revealing itself in a variety of ways: viewing social media, viewing videos on YouTube, checking email, and observation of other people, and so on. With a cell phone at easy disposal, participants tend to use it as a tool to pass the time while waiting, especially while they are ‘on the go’. Within this theme falls observation — this refers to activities including people watching.
ATTITUDES/FEELINGS
All feelings and attitudes recorded from participants fell under one of two categories: positive feelings (& attitudes) and negative feelings (& attitudes). Our diary study uncovered a large range of various emotions and attitudes — the attitude tended to relate directly to what the participant was waiting for.
ACTIVITIES TO PASS TIME
As each participant answered the question “what are you doing while waiting”, a large trend of specific activities emerged from the research data. A trend that emerged within this theme was activities and thoughts surrounding preparation or consumption of food.
SOCIALIZING TO PASS TIME
Participants often socialized with peers, family members or friend to pass time in various situations. In addition to socializing to pass time, a lot of ‘waiting’ situations our participants documented had to do with waiting for family members or friends before engaging in another activity.
SITUATIONAL BEHAVIOUR
We noticed the trend of waiting behaviours that related back to where the participant was. Behaviours tended to correlate directly to the users environment — for example, when users were in a school environment, they would often chat with classmates to pass time.
