Diary Study Design
Prompts at the moment rather than at the end of the day, since recall degrades within hours.
Free — no card needed
Create a free account
to open Diary Study Design — and the other 364 prompts across 21 categories.
Already have an account?
Running it, start to finish
- Confirm a diary study is genuinely necessary rather than an interview.
- Design an entry that takes under two minutes.
- Plan the follow-up interview as part of the study.
What you get back
The output this produces, every time.
- Prompts in the moment, which is the only reason to run a diary study rather than an interview.
- Keeps entries under two minutes, since completion declines fastest exactly when interesting things happen.
- Plans the follow-up interview, where fragmentary entries become explanations.
Getting better results
Where this usually goes wrong, and how to avoid it.
- Allow voice notes. They are faster than typing, preserve tone, and materially improve compliance for the same information.
- Front-load the important period. Compliance declines across any diary study, so design assuming the later entries will be thinner.
- Guard against the vivid entry. Analysis reads for what stands out, which over-weights the dramatic and misses the pattern.
More Research prompts
All Research →- Research
Survey Design That Avoids Garbage
Designs a survey whose answers mean something — no leading questions, no scales that cannot be interpreted, and a plan for the analysis before it is sent.
ClaudeChatGPT000Open → - Research
Claim Verification Trail
Traces a claim back to its original source and reports where the chain breaks, what got distorted, and what the original actually said.
ClaudeChatGPTGemini000Open → - Research
Interview Guide That Avoids Leading
Builds a user or customer interview guide that asks about past behaviour rather than future intentions, which is the only reliable signal.
ClaudeChatGPT000Open →
Written for The AI University. Every prompt in this library is original work — authored, tested and revised here, not collected from elsewhere. 365 of them, free with an account.