Diary Templates Support Quick and Rigorous Experience Research
Translating stakeholder needs into impactful research can feel daunting. Even small design choices impact outcomes and ultimately, the shaping of products. Start more confidently with templates, available for dscout subscribers and project purchasers.
Diary templates support the building of simple, high-quality Diary missions focused on a key research use case or need. With templates, the dscout platform provides the basic research design, informed by our honed best practices; you supply inputs to customize a template for the specific study and stakeholder needs. Alternatively, use a template as a launchpad for your own design, picking and choosing what you keep and modify from the pre-built structure. Nothing is set in stone—take what you need and leave the rest.
Diary templates are found within the mission builder:
There are currently three Diary template options, each representing a critical experience research question across the product development lifecycle: discovery, generation, and evaluation. Researchers at dscout have infused each template with best-practices to ensure confidence and reduce the number of pre-launch check-ins or conversations. Templates really help you hit the ground running.
These are tried-and-true approaches to common experience questions:
- Observe Key Moments: See how your users engage with a product or service in their daily lives
- Review a Product or Experience: Uncover what's a "high" and "low" about specific features of a product or service
- Evaluate Task Performance: Benchmark how well a product or service performs on a set of tasks or behaviors
Missions created from templates are fully editable before launch—from question language, instructional copy, to response prompts. Keep what's useful and adapt the rest to your specific need—they're as flexible as you need them to be.
Templates are also an effective way to upskill junior researchers or democratize your practice by extending research creation to stakeholders on teams like design, product, or sales. The structure provided by templates helps create rigorous studies, so you can focus on those thornier, more strategic initiatives
Access Diary templates by clicking "Create New Diary Mission" from any project landing page. Remember, templates are completely customizable, so use what you need and modify what you don't.