Conducting diary studies with Maze

Diary studies are a longitudinal UX research method used to collect qualitative data over time. It allows you to log the evolution of your participants' thoughts, feelings, preferences, and behaviors over an extended period while they use a product.

A diary study entails participants self-reporting data over an extended period of time, ranging from days to a month or longer. During this time, they'll log specific information about activities regarding the product being studied.

Learn more about diary research

There's no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to setting up your studies for diary research; it'll largely depend on your own goals for the study.

In this article, you'll learn strategies to leverage Maze when running diary research.

Preparing your study

If your study involves collecting feedback about your product, it's possible to use a combination of live website testing and recordings to ask users to think out loud while sharing their use cases from your web app. Learn more about live website tests

Approach 1: Using the same study

If the questions/tasks are the same over time, or when testing with a high number of participants, you can keep using the same study during the research period.

To do so, after publishing the study, toggle Limit to one response per device

off in the share settings. This will allow users to submit their answers more than once. Learn more about testing on the same device

Add parameters to your study URL to pass identifiable metadata about the participant (such as name, gender, email, etc.) in your results dashboard and in the exported .csv file. Learn more about URL parameters

Approach 2: Using multiple studies

Another option is to create several studies.

To stay consistent in your questions and avoid wasting time repeatedly creating the same questions, you can duplicate the original study, or save it as a custom template.

Distributing your study

In-product prompts

If you're setting up multiple studies, you can set up in-product prompts to ask for in-the-moment feedback using a popover directly on your website linking to your study. Learn more about prompts

Participants can interact with a prompt only once. Users who clicked the prompt CTA or dismissed it won't see the same prompt again, unless they ‌clear their browser's cache and cookies or use an incognito window. For this reason, when using prompts on longitudinal studies, you need to set up multiple studies or prompts.

However, there are some nuances to consider if a user has previously answered the study and interacts with the new prompt. Learn more

Reach

If you're setting up multiple studies, you can create a dedicated segment for diary research, and use Reach to send emails (and studies) to users during the research. Learn more about Reach

However, please note that URL parameters aren't supported in Reach. This means that disabling unique sessions and adding identifying metadata isn't possible when sending a Reach campaign. Therefore, Reach is a suitable approach only when creating multiple studies in your study.

Analyzing your results

When responses start rolling in, you can analyze your insights in the results dashboard.

If you're on a paid plan, you can also extract a .csv file with your raw results data. This is particularly helpful if you need to compare the results between different studies, or create your own custom data visualizations.

To learn more about conducting diary research, as well as other UX research techniques, check out our Ultimate Guide for UX Research