---
title: Diary Studies
---
## Diary Studies

To really understand the needs of your target user population, you must observe them. Observations, primarily in the form of troubles the user is having, hacks the user uses, or errors the user user frequently encounters, are crucial to understanding the users needs. Often, these problems are so habitually encountered by the user, that they fail to recognize that this is a need, and thus observation is key. However, what if you want to solve a need in an area that is difficult to observe? Or, what if you want to collect a large number of observations and direct observation would be too difficult to implement? If a task is done infrequently or sporadically or would be difficult to observe for any reason but you would like to observe it, you can often make use of a diary study. 

In a diary study, you give someone a diary that they complete at a specified time or interval. They record, for a specified task, a specific piece of data, such as, how they feel after shopping for some time or what they ate for dinner. Diary studies can be recorded in a variety of mediums. Journals, pictures, audio, and video are all valid ways for a user to record the relevant information. Of course, keep in mind that the best medium is the one which will be most convenient for the user to use in the context of the task. A person who is driving long distances should not be expected to write during their drive. Instead, an audio recording would be more appropriate in this situation. Conversely, if you would like someone to record their thoughts during a lecture, journaling is a better solution since speaking during the silence of a lecture would be inappropriate. The easier it is for the user to record data for you, the better results you will get. Also consider that users may forget to record entries for you. If you provide practice, and make good use of environmental cues, that can aid your study greatly. For example, if you know that many of your target users have smartphones, and will be using them frequently in the context you want to record about, say a bus or subway ride, show them how to record the data on their smartphones. The low barrier to the users being able to fulfill your requests means they will be more likely to remember to do so and more likely to give you good data to use in your project.

<!-- The article goes here, in GitHub-flavored Markdown. Feel free to add YouTube videos, images, and CodePen/JSBin embeds  -->

#### More Information:
<!-- Please add any articles you think might be helpful to read before writing the article -->
[Needfinding Strategies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-rUGDomtz4)
