User Research: Using Instagram Stories for Diary Studies
Learnings and insights from using Instagram Stories to conduct a diary study
If you’re interested in running a diary study for user research and looking for new strategies or methods to collect rich research data, I’ll share my experience using Instagram Stories to gather data from participants.
Overall, I found it to be a successful tool to use during a diary study — though I did have some learnings along the way.
What was our project?
For our master’s capstone project at University of Washington’s Human-Centered Design and Engineering program, my team wanted to empower people to design and prototype non-screen-based experiences (blending the physical and the digital).
After an initial round of qualitative interviews with subject matter experts and aspiring makers, we had put together an educational website consisting of activities, guides, and resources.
But before putting it out into the world, we wanted to validate our designs to make sure the experience was delivering value for aspiring makers.
To get the data we needed, we decided to conduct a diary study with our participants using Instagram Stories.
Why did we choose to use a diary study?
A diary study is a qualitative research method that has participants record entries over time about their experiences. Diary studies are sometimes also referred to as “experience sampling” or “ecological momentary assessment” methodology.
Diary studies allow design researchers to collect minimally intrusive, in-context data over a period of time.
Two elements of diary studies appealed to us for our research:
- “Minimally intrusive and in-context”: We wanted participants to work on the activities we provided at their own pace and in their own home environment — especially important since we were asking them to commit 12–20 hours of their time. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic prevented us from observing our participants in person, even if we wanted to.
- “Over a period of time”: We wanted to understand changes in behaviors, perceptions, and self-reported feelings throughout the entire process of learning about and prototyping these physical-digital experiences.
Why did we choose to use Instagram Stories?
Many diary studies gather data from participants through emails, online forms, or written journals. However, these data-gathering tools can sometimes feel burdensome for participants, especially if they are not already a part of their daily lives. And capturing rich data (photos, videos, audio, sentiment, etc.) through some of these tools can be challenging.
We wanted to experiment with another way of capturing rich data from a diary study — using a tool that was familiar, informal, and encouraged participants to share their progress with us in a lightweight way.
Since all of our target participants already had an Instagram presence and frequently engaged with the platform, we decided to try Instagram Stories to gather our data.
Diary Study Logistics
To prepare for the diary study, we put together kits for participants all the supplies they would need for the experience. Because we were evaluating an experience with a lot of physical components (Arduinos, sensors, actuators, design thinking cards), we needed to actually mail kits to our participants.
We also created a guide to getting started, with detailed instructions on using Instagram Stories:
We gave them a series of prompts to help them reflect in their Instagram Stories (if needed):
- What did you like or dislike about a module?
- Which exercises were useful to you? Any interesting insights?
- What cool projects are you working on?
- Step-by-step documentation of your experience walking through an exercise
- Pain points in designing or prototyping
- What’s missing from this experience?
- What was easy or difficult for you?
- Tell us about your process
- Did you talk to anyone about this? If yes, what did you talk about?
- Are there any ideas you’ve been brainstorming?
- How easy or difficult is it for you to do this at home?
- Is there anything you want to learn that you haven’t learned yet?
We ran the diary study for two weeks, checking in frequently on Instagram as we saw their stories get posted (making sure to screen-record them before they disappeared!).
As Stories came in, we responded directly to any questions or feedback they sent us via direct messages.
We also captured our notes from each of our participants’ Stories in a spreadsheet.
What did we learn about using Instagram Stories for diary studies?
Overall, we loved having participant use Instagram Stories for capturing qualitative data in a diary study.
- Low-friction documentation: Instagram Stories allowed us to meet participants where they were — a platform that was already familiar to them, on a device they had with them all the time (their phone). The Instagram platform provided a lightweight way for them to document and share their experience with us. No need to send us emails, go to a survey link and fill it out, or write journal entries in a notebook — they could just grab their phone from their pocket and start filming short clips to tell us about their experience and their feelings in the moment.
- Breaking down power structures: Using Instagram Stories broke down formal barriers and power structures between researcher and participants. The back-and-forth messages between researchers and participants through Instagram felt like it put everyone on more equal footing. Stripping away some of the formality of research encouraged our participants to open up more with us and have fun with the process — leading more interesting insights and earnest feedback. Of course, depending on your research needs, that lack of formality could be a good or bad thing.
- Community engagement: By posting their Stories on Instagram, some of our participants actually received unexpected support (both emotional and technical) from their friends and community. However, some participants felt like they were oversharing to their community. In the future, it would be good to make it clear to participants that they could send us private Stories rather than creating public Stories.
- Narrative and artifacts: In reflecting on the diary study process after it concluded, participants actually enjoyed that using Instagram Stories naturally forced them into creating engaging video and photo documentation about their experiences. The nature of Instagram Stories was conducive to crafting a narrative and creating artifacts participants could use to reflect on their journey through using our toolkit.
- Rich data: The tools provided in Instagram Stories allowed participants to be highly expressive in documenting their experiences. Videos and photos allowed them to share and narrate their specific point of view — and a wide variety of stickers and text overlays allowed them to add additional expressiveness to their documentation. Enabling participants to express themselves so fully through the tools in Instagram Stories led to rich data and insights.
- Not readily scalable: To capture the data (since Instagram Stories are transient), we would screen-record each story as they came in, drop the recording into Google Drive folders for each participant, and add the link to a research note-taking spreadsheet. From there, we would watch the videos and record our qualitative notes and insights. Obviously, we needed to make sure that we were frequently monitoring our participants’ Instagram accounts to make sure we didn’t miss anything before it disappeared. The process of monitoring Instagram, preserving the data, and analyzing the data amounted to fairly significant overhead. While the process was worth it, we recommend making sure you budget appropriate time for the managing the logistics and make sure you have bandwidth to handle the number of participants you’re working with.
Takeaways
Overall, our team loved using Instagram Stories as a method for gathering data in a qualitative diary study. While it was slightly unconventional, the platform worked well for us and our participants.
If you have a research project that might be a good fit for a diary study, I encourage you to try it out yourself!
