Dear diary: Using diaries to study User Experience

Keeping a diary is not just a hobby undertaken by teenage girls trying to make sense of life and love. Diary methods have been widely used in medical research where patients are asked to keep a diary during a clinical trial or disease treatment. 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.

What kind of UX research questions could diaries help answer? Depending on the design of your diary study, you may get information on the overall impression of a specific device, usage of features, technological acceptance, emotions associated with task performance, or learnability of an application. Of course you could also get this information with a survey, an interview, or a user test. But only diary methods will give you access to temporal and longitudinal information gathered in a natural context of the interaction.