WHAT IS DIARY STUDY?

Diary study is described from usability.gov as following:

A research method that involves providing participants with the materials and structure to record daily events, tasks, and perceptions around a given subject in order to gain insight into their behaviour and needs over time.

Diary study is a research method to collect qualitative data via self- reporting by participants to widen user perspectives of their behaviour, mindsets, and experience over the duration of the study. Diary Studies are oftentimes used for gathering contextual information of how and why users do things, uncovering details that participants are not willing to share in interviews and understand how the product design fits into people’s lives.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

The study was conducted as a group project, and each student was assigned to a group of 6 members. We then started working collaboratively from a brainstorming session to formalize the study plan, to apply various tools running the study, and ultimately to analyze collected data.

Scenario

The scenario that was given to carry out the study is as follows:

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 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.).

PLAN

After we were given the scenario, the top priority is to identify what is the major purpose of Organization Y carrying out this study so that we can narrow our research direction. As the scenario provided, we decided to focus on investigating the waiting experience among our user group. Instead of seeking specific business pattern from the study, we suggested the tone of the study would be broad as a general observation for future research purpose.

Research Question

What behaviours and emotions do people experience while waiting?

Prompt

• Please complete the following form every time you are in a situation where you are waiting.

• What constitutes as “waiting”? Anytime you are… waiting for a bus, for food to cook, waiting in line for something, waiting for a friend after class/work, etcetera.

Questionnaire Design

The questionnaire is designed as follows, consisted of 2 open-ended and 2 multiple choice questions.

• What are you doing while waiting? (open-end)

• How do you feel? (open-end)

• How long have you been waiting for? (multiple choice)

• What are you waiting for? (multiple choice)

RUNNING THE STUDY

Once the study and the questionnaire were ready, we moved on to the next phase: running the study. We recruited 6 students from the same course as our participants. Each of them submitted a minimum of 3 diary entries per day via the link to the questionnaire provided through email. The questionnaire was built from Google Form which allows the participant to submit diary entries by answering a series of questions planned in the previous phase.

Boomerang as a google chrome extension was also used to send a periodical reminder email to participants to ensure the quantity of each participant submitted throughout the length of the study.

Through Google Form, the data was collected within its online platform automatically with an availability of various data visualization based on different criteria. Upon the completion of data collection, we export all the diary entries collected into Google sheets and work on analyzing the data in the next phase.

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FINDINGS

To analyze our study data, an affinity diagramming was created as a team task by workshops with post-its and later finalized collaboratively into a digital version. From the diagram, 5 themes are identified towards our participants’ behaviour and attitude of their waiting experience.

Identified Themes

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.

Reflections

Reviewing diary entries unveiled the insufficiency of our study scope (e.g., participants recruited or the length of study). As we set our study to be a general observation having a broad research question as well as being credible for future research reference, the data we collected should be able to cover the majority of use case. Take age as an example, ‘young adult’ covers a wide range of people can be further categorized into subgroups. By scaling up our project scope, it will help to uncover the differences in attitude and behavior between each subgroup towards waiting.

The correlation between participants’ feelings and the length of they had waited is another question that we have ignored when synthesizing the study and should be further researched, which is to say the longer the participants waited would possibly influence their emotional reactions. If we had taken time factor into consideration of analyzing, there would much more compelling insights await to discover.