A diary study is a longitudinal research method where participants report their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors over time.
Since diary studies are longer than most user-research studies and require initiative on the part of the participant to record entries, they can be plagued with issues like forgetfulness, dwindling interest in the study, and increasing fatigue or boredom in reporting entries. In this article, we’ll discuss 6 tips to keep participants engaged during a diary study.
Tip 1. Recruit Wisely
Some people make better participants in diary studies than others. Diary studies often require participants to respond to prompts in a timely manner and in sufficient detail. Therefore, it’s important you recruit participants that have time to participate and that might enjoy sharing or logging their activities and thoughts over time.
To ensure you recruit people who are willing to spend time in your study, clearly explain what the time commitment will be and what the diary study involves in your recruitment materials. This information helps participants self-exclude if they don’t believe they can make the needed time commitment.
When recruiting from a panel, it’s common for participants to sign up for studies without properly reading the study description. To ensure that participants have read and understood the time commitment, consider including a question (or two) about the time commitment in the screener. For example, if a diary study requires 3 hours of time over a 2-week period, you can ask participants whether they’d be willing to spend this amount of time. Believe it or not, some participants select “No” to these questions.
Some participants are better at expressing their thoughts in writing or in video. If you’re intending to collect detailed text-based or video-based responses (where participants might need to answer lots of open-ended questions) during your diary study, incorporate at least one broad, open-ended question in your screener questionnaire. This question will give you a feel for how comfortable and detailed participants are in expressing their thoughts and how much effort they are willing to put in. A detailed response to an open-ended question likely indicates a high level of commitment to participating in the study and possibly a better fit, given the subject matter.
Another — more intensive and risk-averse — strategy for recruiting ideal participants is to make the diary study an optional second study. With this approach, you invite participants to an initial interview and inform them that they will be invited to a diary study if you believe they will be a good fit. You can then use the interview to gauge each participant’s commitment level and also select who would be interesting to follow in the diary study.
Tip 2. Choose the Best Tool
There are many diary-study tools, such as survey platforms, social media apps, online documents, and specialized contextual-research platforms (such as dscout or Indeemo).
To encourage participation, try and minimize the interaction cost of making an entry. While the tool you use might be mainly dictated by your budget and the kind of data you’d like to collect, you should also consider what devices your participants use and their familiarity with any tool you choose. For example, if participants are likely to be doing activities on a desktop device, it might be harder for them to record helpful entries if they need to use a mobile app. If your study involves lots of open-ended questions, then a social media app or specialized diary-study app (like dscout), where participants can record a voice note or video, will make recording entries easier and less time-consuming.
Regardless of what tool you use, it’s a good idea to pilot your diary study.
Tip 3. Onboard Participants Properly
Schedule a pre-study brief, especially if your study design is complex or you estimate that participants will have difficulty to use your chosen diary-study tool without some onboarding. In the pre-study brief, you can provide:
- A walkthrough (or practice trial) of the diary-study tool, if needed
- An explanation of the study procedure
- An overview of what kind of entries are helpful
- An overview of the incentive structure (i.e., how participants will be rewarded)
- Information about any conditions which might make an entry invalid or where a participant might be withdrawn from the study
- A chance for participants to ask questions
Pre-study briefs can also be extended to include an interview if you’d like to learn more about the participant and their experience. Not only do pre-study briefs ensure any technical issues or sources of confusion are remedied before the study begins, but they also help with building rapport. Participants are more likely to report entries if they feel they personally know the researcher who is conducting the study.
Tip 4. Keep Diary-Study Entries Short
Typically, the researcher provides a “template” for the participant to use when making an entry — this might be a set of survey-like questions or prompts or an invitation to upload a video or photo of something. When designing these entry templates, it’s tempting to prepare many questions for a participant to answer. However, the more participants have to do with each entry, the greater the chance they abandon reporting altogether. Therefore, keep questions and prompts to a minimum and reserve them for things that are necessary to answer your research questions. If participants are spending more than 15 minutes making an entry, this is too much!
For example, if you’re performing a diary study with the purpose of creating a customer-journey map, then you might want to ask participants what device they used and how they felt about the interaction they had with the company every time they report an entry. This would ensure you gathered the data you need to populate swimlanes in the customer-journey map.
Tip 5. Maintain Contact with the Participant
It’s a good idea to keep in touch with your participant throughout the duration of the study. If you’re using a dedicated diary-study tool or a social media app, it’s easy to ask followup questions and respond to entries as they come in. Even a simple “thank you” can keep participants feeling motivated in the study. When participants go quiet, reach out and see if they need any help or support. This shows participants that you haven’t forgotten about them and still care about receiving their entries.
If participants need to provide entries at regular intervals, you can schedule reminders. For example, in one recent diary study involving UX professionals, we asked participants to record an entry at the end of each work day for three weeks. To ensure that participants didn’t forget, we created a recurring calendar invite.
While it’s a good idea to keep in touch with participants and ask occasional followup questions, be prudent about the number of messages or followup questions you send. Participants can quickly feel like they can’t keep up with the study if they receive too many followup questions. Or, if they are flooded with messages, they may start ignoring them.
Tip 6. Be Creative with Your Incentive Structure
Incentives keep participants engaged and willing to document their experiences over time. Make sure you provide an appropriate incentive for the time that participants are spending in the study. If you’re not sure how much to incentivize participants with, here's a helpful calculator.
Your incentive structure can be used to encourage high-quality contributions at regular intervals. To illustrate this, consider a diary study where participants only receive one payment at the end of the study. While this structure could be effective for shorter studies, it might be risky for longer studies as some participants might feel it’s too much work to receive a reward and drop out. One simple improvement is to provide payments at intervals throughout the diary; this approach reduces the risk of dropouts and ensures more-evenly spread entries across the duration of the study. For example, instead of receiving $100 after 4 weeks of logging entries, participants might receive $25 after each week if they’ve completed a minimum number of entries. (The downside of this approach is that some participants who have fulfilled their quota for the week may “save up” entries to report them later, so they can maximize the reward while minimizing effort.)
You can also pay participants per entry (some incentive delivery platforms offer integrations that allow you to automate incentive delivery with each submitted entry). If you decide to utilize a pay-per-entry model, consider providing tiered payment amounts. For example, in a recent 4-week diary study, we paid participants $15 for their first 4 entries each week. Participants who had more to report could make 4 more entries for $5 each. This amount was large enough to encourage participants who had more to report to continue submitting entries, but not as big as to prompt people to make up entries if they had fewer interactions to report.
Consider offering bonus payments to reward consistency throughout the diary study. For example, in the same study, participants received an additional $20 if they made at least 4 entries each week of the diary study.
Conclusion
It can be challenging to keep participants engaged in diary studies due to their length and amount of work. Start by making sure you recruit participants who are clearly motivated to participate. To ensure you receive helpful entries throughout the study, keep the entry-creation process simple, regularly follow up with participants, and provide smart incentives.
Learn more about diary studies in our full-day course on Ethnographic UX Research or our 5-day series on Qualitative Research.
