Methods
Diary Study
Facts:
Lifecycle stage: User Research
See also: Cultural Probe
Contributors: Shannon McHarg, Chauncey Wilson, Nigel Bevan
Version: 1/2010
A diary study requires users, or observers of users, to keep track of activities or events in some form of diary or log for a particular period of time.
Participants or observers may be asked to track specific items like mobile device usage, use of personal calendars, and course work or general activities like "what you did for each 30 minutes of your work day." Diary entries can include: text accounts of events, pictures, video, audio, sketches, and voice-mail.
The main benefit of a diary study is to get information about the user's experience over time. The feedback is also often provided while the user is interacting with the product, so there is less of a lag in the feedback than with other methods and it is in the actual context of use. The main disadvantage is that all information is self-reported.
Read More About It
Czerwinski, M., Horvitz, E., & Wilhite, S. (2004). A Diary Study of Task Switching and Interruptions, Proceedings of CHI 2004, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2004, Vienna. (Available online: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/vibe/chi2004diarystudyfinal.pdf)
Case study of a diary study that demonstrates how the method is used to understand the impact of interruptions that are external to the system.
Intille, S., Kukla, C., & Ma, X. (2002). Eliciting User Preferences Using Image-Based Experience Sampling and Reflection," Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems. ACM. (Available online with an ACM membership: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=506573)
Case study of a diary study that uses photographs of the user's experience.
Rieman, J. (1993). The diary study: a workplace-oriented research tool to guide laboratory efforts. Proceedings of the INTERACT '93 and CHI '93 conference on Human factors in computing systems, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. (Available online with an ACM membership: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=169255)
Detailed description of the method.
