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 mazes 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 maze
Approach 1: Using the same maze
If the questions/tasks are the same over time, or when testing with a high number of participants, you can keep using the same maze during the research period.
To do so, after publishing the maze, toggle Unique session 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 maze URL to pass identifiable metadata about the tester (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 mazes
Another option is to create several mazes.
To stay consistent in your questions and avoid wasting time repeatedly creating the same questions, you can duplicate the original maze, or save it as a custom template.
Distributing your maze
In-product prompts
If you're setting up multiple mazes, you can set up in-product prompts to ask for in-the-moment feedback using a popover directly on your website linking to your maze. 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 mazes or prompts.
However, there are some nuances to consider if a user has previously answered the maze and interacts with the new prompt. Learn more
Reach
If you're setting up multiple mazes, you can create a dedicated segment for diary research, and use Reach to send emails (and mazes) 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 mazes 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 mazes, or create your own custom data visualizations.