BE A SUBJECT IN A DIARY STUDY

 

You are going to log your information-seeking activity for one day.

For one day during the week of Sept 30, whenever you feel the need to find or search out some information either at work or at home, log your activity. For example, you may need information for an assignment or a paper; a bus schedule; a phone number; or a location. You will use either (1) a paper log (here's the form) or (2) a camera (the latter works best if you have a cameraphone or a small digital camera).

The point of this is for you to practice being a subject in a diary study.

At the end of the day, write a summary addressing:

-What did you learn about your information seeking strategies and information sources?

-How reliable do you think your self-report is?

-What problems did you have with this taskas a subject?

-Consider yourself a pre-test. If you were to implement this study, how would you re-design it? What instructions would a subject need? How well did the form work (if you used it)? Could you have done this for a longer period? Say, a week?

Finally, what do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of diary studies?

2 pages.

Sources used for inspiration:

Brown, B. A. T., Sellen, A. J., & O'Hara, K. p. (2000). A diary study of information capture in working life. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 438-445). New York: ACM Press.

Adler, A., Gujar, A., Harrison, B. L., O'Hara, K., and Sellen, A. 1998. A diary study of work-related reading: design implications for digital reading devices. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Los Angeles, California, United States, April 18 - 23, 1998). C. Karat, A. Lund, J. Coutaz, and J. Karat, Eds. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, 241-248