Video Diary Hassles
If you are a practitioner of user research of some sort, I am sure you have come across with, or even conducted a research using diaries. Diaries can last for a few days to months if long, but the idea behind is to basically understand how a certain product, service, or any other target of your interest, is integrated into their lives. By asking participants to keep record of actual consumption or use, not only the researchers would understand the frequency and context of us, but also the participants themselves would be able to understand about their usage behaviors. As a result, any interview following the diary study is often very insightful because participants seem to know better about themselves.
At times where different technologies available, there are so many media types we could use to keep diaries.
Text Diaries
You can ultimately use pen and paper, and the effort required from researchers for preparation is fairly low. It also feels easier to ask participants because unlike using cameras, the participant can behave fairly normally upon recording (humiliation factor = low). However, today is the time when people use SMS instead of handwritten letters, and write reports using Microsoft Word instead of papers. Writing a decent amount of text on a piece of paper can be surprisingly a big effort for some people (perceived effort = surprinsingly high). But it also has an advantage that the information collected comes in a reasonable file size and it is often easy to share with your project mates and customers.
Photo Diaries
Now that many handsets come with camera features, it has become fairly easy to request for photo diaries by using inbuilt cameras. In countries like Japan, where many people use sha-mail (photo-attached messages), the method works well without any additional investment on equipments. The fact that we do not need to lend any equipment reduces many practicalities from researchers. You save money, time to distribute the equipments, and time participants learn how to use them. Another strong benefit is that the information can come almost real time since they can simply request them to send those messages to an email account or even to a blog.
However, this approach has its own drawbacks. One obvious problem I noticed is the image quality. Most camera phones, although they are equipped with mega pixel cameras, optimize the file size to be sent from the phone. Those reduced images are often poor in quality. Another problem is that the participant decides what is interesting about the situation. Typically, it only contains a single angle, covering a person’s face or a meal, but not both. What is often left out is the set-up, the atmosphere of the place he or she is in, or with whom they are with.
Video Diaries.
Recently as I used video diary as a method for one research. I had many positive and negative experience.
The most obvious and biggest problem was the equipment. Initially we planned to take clips with participants’ mobile phones and uploading them to YouTube, we quickly found the approach too optimistic. This is just my assumption but for some exceptionally advanced users who utilize the fixed data plans, uploading as large files as video clips, is something they wouldn’t even try doing. This was quite a shock to me, as among any consumers I know in the world, Japanese would be the ones who are technically advanced and had high-spec phones.
What did we do in the end? Well, as you can see from the image, we basically bought portable camcorders and distributed them. I believe some of you have already tried this approach. It is ok if you are distributing the device to people in a same workplace or in proximity, but when you have strict recruitment criteria (e.g. a factory worker in 40s whose workplace would allow video recording) and had to travel around the city, simply distributing the cameras and collecting them have created us so much workload to the team.
And because we tried to save money with the device, we purchased a low-end device that cost 150 EUR each. After purchasing 20 of them, they are still not very cheap. And later we found out, that the biggest drawback of these device, was not the image quality but the battery life. After realizing this, we had to remind participants that they not only had to carry an extra device but also to remember to charge them everyday. Not that these people do not own a mobile phone to carry and charge as often.
But video diaries, brought me some positive surprises. The biggest treat was to realize how rich the information could be when participant realized how fun it is to take videos and captured their life. Either intentionally or by chance, participants from my recent study showed not only themselves and products we are interested but also their surroundings. In some cases they turned around 360 degrees, or used their own tripods to capture themselves inside the context. Now with photos, I normally see an element of the context: a face or a meal, but here a 30-second clip would easily contained both, with participants speaking, colleagues teasing, and cars honking in the back. Image quality will never be as high as still images, but video clips gave us more samples to choose from when it comes to crop out the images that seem to be effective to use later on for reporting and to accompany personas and scenario descriptions. It was visually strong.
Unfortunately, video was the method which required us the biggest analysis effort. We had to drag non-project members to sit and watch 12 people’s 3-days worth of video clips so we could transcribe quotes. But I did enjoy some of the moments when one of us came across with interesting clips and couldn’t help grinning.
Below is still a sketch of things, but all in all here are the takes about the diary methods. My apology in advance for not making this a proper comparison chart.
Perceived effort for keeping diaries:
Text = fairly high
Photos = medium
Video clips = medium
Perceived humiliation for keeping diaries:
Text = low
Photos = low to medium
Video = high, especially if video diaries requires recording in social space
Cost:
Text = low, data can be sent via email or by fax (if handwritten)
Photos
= fairly low, countries with high camera phone penetration rate does
not require any loan of equipment, data can be sent via email
Video = high
File size:
Text = small
Photos = medium to high (depending on the quality)
Video clips = too high for most people’s network bandwidth
Sharing real time:
Text = doable, via emails and blogs
Photos = doable, via emails and blogs
Video = difficult, requires bandwidth and literacy to do so (exception may be if you have great human resources or bike delivery systems)
Time stamps
Text = Unless each data is sent via email, date and time have to be handwritten. Often time is rounded, e.g. “around 8″ or “around 8:30″, which seems somewhat loses the truthfulness from data.
Photos = Cameras leave time stamps, in some cases even geographic data. There are also many photography tools available free/cheap, and this makes it easy for researchers to sort.
Videos = Videos leave time stamps as well, but not easily browsable as photos.
Analysis effort:
Text = relatively low (though I wonder if I could say any analysis is low in effort)
Photos = medium. Photos enable researchers to spot interesting data, but photos alone would be almost cryptic.
Video clips = high. Watching videos are interesting, but in the end someone has to transcribe.
