Diary research (also known as diary study) is a longitudinal UX research method used to collect qualitative data through participants keeping a diary to record their thoughts, feelings, and behavior over an extended period of time 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 mazes for diary research; it will largely depend on your own goals for the study. In this article, you’ll learn some strategies to leverage Maze when running diary studies.
Setting up your maze(s)
- Toggle “Unique session”: If you need to allow people to answer the same maze on the same device, you can disable “Unique session” in the search settings. Learn more about testing on the same device
- Use templates: Reusing templates helps you stay consistent and uniform in your questions, and not waste time repeatedly creating the same questions. Particularly, if you’re on the Organization plan, you can save your own templates for this purpose. Learn more about templates
- Create a dedicated maze for each participant: If you’re not managing a large number of participants, you can create one maze for each participant, instead of sharing the same maze with all participants. This way, it's easier to analyze results on a per-participant basis.
Participant tracking and follow-up
- Send share links with parameters: Add parameters to pass identifiable metadata about the tester (such as name, gender, email, etc.) in your results dashboard. Learn more about URL parameters
- Set up campaigns using Reach: Create a dedicated segment for diary research, and use Reach to send emails (and mazes) to users over the course of the research. Learn more about Reach
- Set up in-product prompts: Another option would be to ask for in-the-moment feedback using a popover directly on your website linking to your maze. Learn more about Prompts
Analyzing your results
- Results dashboard: When responses start rolling in, you can leverage Maze’s results dashboard to analyze your insights.
- Export your data: You can also easily export your raw results data.