I read Gavin Lew's (User Centric) article "The Truth is Out There: Using Mobile Technology for Experience Sampling" in the latest issue of User Experience Volume 7, Issue 3, 2008. (the paper version was delivered to my door via postal mail and I could not find a hyperlink yet on the UPA Publications website - sorry for the digression).
Rightly, he laments that lack of research in the wild as well as the need for longitudinal research. Specifically, we don't know much about the influencers of usage such as: motivation, fun and emotion. He discusses the common use of a diary to capture usage information to gain deeper insight to user activity and motivation.
One of the few longitudinal studies that we had conducted used a diary as method for capturing end user information and usage. The diary enabled us to learn more about what would happen to wanted vs. unwanted calls that were screened by a new telephone service.
Chin, John P., Herring, Richard D. and Familant, M. Elliott (1992): A Usability and Diary Study Assessing the Effectiveness of Call Acceptance Lists. In: Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 36th Annual Meeting 1992. pp. 216-220.
This study involved prototyping and testing feasibility of a caller acceptance list for Personal Communication Service (PCS). The caller acceptance list would allow only callers on the list to contact the PCS subscriber directly rather than be redirected to voice mail. The studied examined the impact of the users' caller acceptance list over a two week period based on a record of all phone calls received by end users The results showed that a caller acceptance list reduces the number of unwanted calls by one-third. The insights were valuable, worthy of the large amount of time and effort involved.
The challenge is to convince paying customers/clients that these longer term studies are worth the investment. With the new technologies in place, this may be the right time to pursue more research in the wild that is outside of the laboratory.
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