Diary Studies

A Diary Study captures real-world user behaviours, experiences, and attitudes over time, providing valuable insights into how digital products fit into users’ daily lives.

Participants log activities and interactions at set intervals, revealing patterns, challenges, and evolving needs that traditional research may overlook. This method is particularly useful in healthcare and pharma to understand how HCPs, patients, and caregivers engage with digital tools in real-world settings.

Service details

Deliverables

Planning and execution of a tailored diary study, capturing user experiences over time. Our UX researchers analyse the findings and provide actionable insights to guide product design.

Benefits

Gain real-world, in-depth user insights to help identify user needs and understand their day-to-day realities, so that you can design more relevant and impactful digital experiences.

What is a diary study?

A Diary Study is a qualitative UX research method where participants document their experiences as they happen or at scheduled intervals—usually over a few days or a few weeks. It can be structured (with predefined prompts) or free-form, depending on the research focus.

Examples include:

Patients tracking symptoms or treatment adherence to inform digital health solutions
Clinicians documenting workflow interactions with medical software to highlight usability challenges
Users testing a new app feature and logging their experience to assess engagement and functionality

Diary studies can also be used alongside other types of user research to provide supplementary information and build confidence in the insights drawn. For example, matching diary study results to survey results for consistency in self-reporting, or conducting a diary study in conjunction with user research interviews to understand people's thought processes over a period of time.

How can conducting a Diary Study help you?

Diary Studies will help you learn more about how your users act in real-world situations and build up a picture of their natural behaviours and experiences. They provide detailed contextual information that can be shared with design teams and accounted for when creating your digital experiences.

Key benefits:

Reveals real-world behaviours by capturing how users naturally interact with digital products
Uncovers usability issues that may not surface in lab-based testing
Identifies evolving user needs over days or weeks, helping to assess product engagement and learnability
An alternative to field studies as they can be delivered remotely for geographically distributed user groups
Supports informed decision-making by ensuring design and feature development are based on actual user experiences