Lessons from a friends and family photo diary study

I was pretty excited about the concept of photo diary studies, but I wanted to get a feel for what it was like to run one, and what type of information I could expect to find out. So, I decided to run one with friends and family. I felt sure that I could get my family members to play along.

Logistics:

• I did a “call” for participants via email and family blog. I had 8 people reply that they were interested.


• I came up with a list of 15 activities. I tried to have them range from vague to concrete. I split the activities up into three weeks, to see whether I could maintain participation for that long.

Here was the list:

• Week 1 Activities:
  1. “This is me”
  2. "Who I am" - Take a picture that tells me who you are (anything that reflects your values, beliefs, personality or other….) and describe it for me
  3. "Past" - Take a picture that represents your past
  4. "Future" - Take a picture that represents your future
  5. "Frustrating" - Take a picture of something you find frustrating
  6. "Delightful" - Take a picture of something you find delightful
  7. "Fun" - Take a picture of something fun
  
• Week 2 Activities
  1. “Morning” - Take a sequence of at least 4 pictures representing your morning routine
  2. “Family” - Take a picture of someone in your life that you consider to be family
  3. “Desk” - Take a picture of your desk (or where you work, use your computer, etc)
  4. “Shopping” - Take a picture the next time you are shopping and describe where you are, what you are doing, and why
  5. “Challenge” - Take a picture representing your biggest challenge
  6. “Loud” - Take a picture of something loud
  7. “Life” - Take a picture that represents something you would like to do with your life
  
• Week 3 Activity (final week!)
  1. “Day” - Pick a day and take pictures throughout the day to document your day. Describe what went well and what didn’t go well during this day (include pictures, if you can).
  

How it worked out
Actual participation was much worse than expected. Of the 8 participants:

• Two participants didn’t post anything at all


• One participant only posted the “This is me” photo


• One participant only posted activities 2-5 on week 1


• One participant did the first 2 weeks, but not the last


• Three participants did all of the activities

Some technical challenges came up:

• One participant couldn’t upload her pictures because they were too large


• One participant had some goofs with uploading a few pictures (where she uploaded the wrong ones and then couldn’t figure out how to edit the entries, so she just sent duplicates)

All of the participants used existing photos as well as taking photos for the study. What surprised me what the proportion of photos that were “pre-existing”. Of the 123 images submitted, 40 pictures were clearly existing images that were uploaded.

Since I knew these people, I was in a unique position to understand the pictures and how accurate a picture of each participant was conveyed by the images and content. I felt that the overall representations were fairly accurate, although quite limited.

The best pictures came from very concrete tasks:

• Desk


• Morning


• Day
  

I liked these images… people seemed to GET INTO it and they gave a wide variety of images and interpretations:

• Challenge


• Frustrating


• Loud

The least useful were the tasks that were trying to get at who the person was. These elicited more anxiety in the participants, then revealed very predictable images having to do with parenting, etc:

• Who I am


• Past


• Future


• Life


• Family

Wrap-up
Overall, I was happy with what I’d learned from the study. I learned that the logistics of setting up and encouraging participation were pretty time consuming, but that the joy of getting people’s images made it all worthwhile. I think these types of studies might be useful for giving us a picture of what customers are like in different parts of the country (and/or world), but that it limits our view so much that it cannot be used in place of actually going there in person. I also learned that it would be very difficult to get people to really document something that they are doing on a regular basis. Once, perhaps… but not many times. For example, this really wouldn’t work if we asked someone to take a picture of what they were doing each time they logged into email for a couple of weeks.