Diary Templates help researchers to quickly build a simple, high-quality Diary mission around a key research use case.
What are Diary Templates?
With Diary Templates, Dscout provides the basic research design, informed by our best practices; you supply inputs to customize the template for your specific study.
Missions created from Diary Templates are fully editable before launch – so you can still add or remove questions, change a pick list of answer choices, and make any desired language tweaks. Think of Templates as a solid starting point for building a multi-activity Diary mission with a warm-up, a media-rich middle of moments or feedback, and a wrap-up.
Our goal with Diary Templates is to help researchers – especially those new to Dscout – quickly and confidently launch Diary missions that yield useful, easier-to-analyze data.
What Diary Templates are available?
There are currently three Diary Templates for you to choose from: Observe Key Moments, Review a Product or Experience, and Evaluate Task Performance.
Observe Key Moments
Eager to explore how a product, service, or experience fits into people’s lives? With the Observe Key Moments template, scouts will show you their moments of use or interaction over several days. You’ll learn when and why they turn to this product, service, or experience, and how they’d like to see it evolve.
- In the warm-up activity, scouts will share how long they’ve been using the product, service, or experience, how often they use it, what they like and dislike about it, and typical situations of use.
- Then scouts will capture 1-7 moments with the product, service, or experience. For each moment, they’ll record a video and describe the context.
- In the wrap-up activity, after paying close attention to their use of the product, service, or experience for several days, scouts will reflect on their overall experience and what they’d like to see improved or changed.
Review a Product or Experience
Curious to understand what’s working and what’s not when it comes to certain aspects of a product, service, or experience? Choose 2-5 specific features or aspects for scouts to assess and prioritize for improvement. You’ll learn where each feature shines, where it falls short, and what could make it better.
- In the warm-up activity, scouts will share how long they’ve been using the product, service, or experience, how often they use it, what they like and dislike about it, and typical situations of use.
- Then scouts will review 2-5 specific features or aspects of the product, service, or experience in turn -- one feature per activity. For each feature, they’ll share how often they use it, what they like/dislike about it, and what would make it better.
- In the wrap-up activity, after reviewing each feature individually, scouts will choose one feature that they’d most like to see improved and explain why.
Evaluate Task Performance
Interested to see how people accomplish certain tasks or behaviors with a product, service, or experience? Choose 2-5 specific tasks or behaviors for scouts to perform and evaluate. You’ll capture videos or screen recordings of each task in action to pinpoint where scouts stumble and where they succeed.
- In the warm-up activity, scouts will share how long they’ve been using the product, service, or experience, how often they use it, what they like and dislike about it, and typical situations of use.
- Then scouts will perform specific 2-5 tasks or behaviors with the product, service, or experience in turn -- one task per activity. They’ll record each task in action, then report on its ease and relevance to their use of the product, service, or experience.
- In the wrap-up activity, after performing the specified set of tasks, scouts will reflect on their interactions with the product, service, or experience overall.
How do I use Diary Templates?
Create your Diary mission by selecting the "+" icon next to the Diary on the right-hand menu of your project page. In the modal that opens, you’ll see three Diary Templates to choose from.
For each template, you have the option to click “Preview” to check out the mission structure and questions included in that template, or jump right to “Customize” to provide inputs to tailor the template for your specific study.
Each template has different features you can customize when setting up the template. These include variable inputs (e.g. “subject” for the name of a product, service, or experience you’re studying) and specifying the desired media type (video or screen record).
Once you’ve customized your template with the inputs that fit your specific study, click “Create Mission” to build your Diary mission.
From there, you’ll land in the Diary mission builder, where your template mission is fully editable before launch -- you can add or remove questions, change a pick list of answer choices, and make any desired language tweaks.
You can also use the bulk editor at the top of the page to make changes to variables; any changes will be applied throughout the mission.
When your mission is exactly how you want it and you’ve done a final proofread, you’ll add scouts to your mission on the Invites tab, then click “Launch” to open the mission and send scouts their invites.