Diary Study: Behaviors, Attitudes Around Drinking Speciality Drinks

Project Type: UX Research

Project Output: Blogpost

Project Length: 2 weeks

Team: Yasmin Bajwa, Karan Sarpal, Nelly Martinez, Fulya Caliskan, Victoria Yeboah

Overview of the Project

This study was conducted to explore people’s attitudes, experiences and behaviors towards their daily speciality beverages. The data gathered in this diary study, included users in a situational sense. It was processed to understand our participants motivations, emotions, pains and gains regarding their speciality drink intake. Speciality drinks defined for the purpose of this study is anything but water. Examples include, but are not limited to: Energy Drinks, Coffee/Tea, Smoothies, Alcoholic Drinks or any other soft drink.

Phase 1 — Recruiting: A total of four participants were selected for providing daily diary entries for 3 days starting from 10th December 2020 to 12th December 2020 to cover the purpose of this study. These participants were shared objectives via a common email diarystudy.resturantrewards@gmail.com.

Phase 2 — Analyzing: The information acquired was then dissected through an Affinity Map diagram to recognize certain themes. Identifying the themes then allowed further exploration by building up commonalities among various characters of the theme.

Phase 3 — Results: Finally, the outcomes were then summarized to reflect the outcomes of the research and further explore the possible outcomes.

Scenario

Energy Drink Product Launch by a Startup in Toronto

Company XYZ is a Canadian startup set up in 2018 which is planning to launch its “Energy Drink product” during the holidays of 2020. This energy drink is to be marketed towards the student population. They’ve been planning to launch the product for two years now, however due to COVID 19 they have gone to a melancholy mode.

Earlier in 2019, this company hired students from Humber Colleges’ User Experience Program. Research was halted prior to launch as the pandemic created some uncertainty in user behaviours. Factors such as users’ behaviours, attitudes, motivations, ways of getting a product, pains and gains had to be reconsidered.

We have been hired by the company to help them understand the current vs past situations and scenario and whether it’s the correct time to launch a new product in the market. Our findings from this research will also help them in discovering new opportunities.

Research Question

Our research objective is to understand the way in which student’s in particular are sourcing their drinks and when do they give in to these cravings. Furthermore, we wanted to understand people’s attitudes, experiences and behaviors towards their daily speciality beverage.

The goal is to propose a solution as a selling point to launch a new energy drink marketed towards the student population.

We identified two major Research Questions:

• When are people giving in to their drink cravings?
• How does the pandemic affect drinking habits, if at all?

Diary Study Prompts/ Emails

In conducting our diary study prompts we collected data that would shed light into participants behaviors, attitudes and emotions around drinking specialty drinks. We asked a total of two multiple choice questions and two open ended questions. The intention was to collect qualitative data over quantitative given the scope of our research.

Additionally, we wanted to understand why they selected their drink, how did they get it and how it made them feel. These prompts assisted in helping us answer our research question on what triggers people to drink a speciality drink.

We crafted these prompts around the routine journey of the participants as we asked for a submission for morning, afternoon and evening. These times would reveal habits around mealtimes that would later reveal interesting findings. Below we have listed our email instructions followed by our diary prompts:

Challenges Encountered

We encountered challenges while both collecting the data and making sure the data is actually useful and balances with our research objectives. While going through the answers given by our participants and visualising the graphs as the summary, we faced few moderate to high level challenges:

• Participant recruiting was challenging because students were busy during finals. This may have prevented us from getting quality data
• Not every participant was able to submit the required three entries per day.
• Pandemic closings may have affected how many people dined out
• Some participants selected “Other” as a multiple-choice response, but did not describe what this was
• Short answers responses were not always descriptive

Synthesizing Data

We monitored four participants’ diary entries in this study for a total of three days. The participants were two females and two males aged 20–25, living in the Greater Toronto Area. We asked the daily study participants what and why they drank, how they got their drinks, and what they felt, and we collected data entries in various intervals throughout the day.

Quantitative analysis

Participants chose different drinks at different times of the day. While the patterns were observed in the people’s drink preferences according to their likes or diets, there was no similarity in the whole group. For example, Participant A’s healthy diet drives her to a homemade smoothie, while Participant B usually consumes lemon-orange or fruit-flavored cans drink from the outside.

The question of why the participants chose this drink concentrates on two answers. 41% of the participants prefer drinking for taste, while 25% favor it because it is healthy.

37% of the participants provide their drinks from home, also 63% from outside.

We used the affinity diagram method to analyze the moods these participants reported well having their drinks. The affinity diagram method helped us group different themes and patterns. In the first step, we gave keywords to participants including all diary entries and combined them in a worksheet.

In the second stage, we put the concepts that constitute our research questions at the center, and we grouped the related answers under themes. We found the opportunity to see the concepts that participants have shared with others and how frequently they repeated them.

In the last step, we continued grouping until all the cards were used, and as a result, we reached seven main reasons that affect the participants’ choice of drinks, as shown below.

· Cost factor

· Convenience- Making at Home

· Safety- not going out because of Covid

· Positive Mood

· Type of diet

· Paring with food

· Energy

Themes Identified

Our diagramming revealed some themes that we have identified below:

Participants are considering Cost Factor as they are mainly students

Drinking at home is cheaper than going out, and buying drinks at the grocery store was also a more popular option than dining in. This decision factor might relate to the sociographic of our participants, as all of them were students.

Participants want flexibility and Convenience

Preparing drinks at home makes more sense when working from home or doing distance learning. Also, all comments on home-made drinks included praise on flavour, which indicates that having the facility to make their own drinks ensures a delicious customization.

Participants considering Safety as their top priority

Many participants reported having drinks at home, rather than dining out. This gave them a sense of safety during the uncertain times of the pandemic.

Participants drank to alter their Moods

Almost all the reported beverages are high in sugar. This makes sense with the fact that most participants mentioned they benefited from feeling more energized, and that they reported having a positive mood after drinking. We can infer that participants drank to alter their mood.

Participants are more comfortable in having their own Type of diet

When looking for nutrition, participants tossed some fruits into the blender and created their own smoothies. This reinforces the insight of the convenience of making their own beverages at home and consider their preferred style of diet.

Participants are willing to Pair their drinks With Food

A tasty drink boosts up any meal. Depending on the food that participants were having, they chose a beverage accordingly. When participants usually pair certain drinks with certain foods, it was identified as ritual. One of them said: “A coca cola always adds a refreshing and enjoyable taste to complete my pizza order.”

Participants are choosing Energy as their purpose

Drinking to keep up with the day. Participants reported having their beverages during the day, while only one of the participants reported having a drink with the purpose of relaxing at night, and he did it only once. So, while most participants expressed choosing a beverage because of its taste, it is evident in their comments that they were also looking after feeling more energized.

Reflection

Upon completion of our study, we had some aspects we reflected on. This type of study gave us raw data that was concise, however limited in ways. These insights are only a starting point and would need to be revisited in an ongoing study.

To do this we would extend the test duration at a later time. The test would run longer for each user, allowing for more data points. This would allow us to have more substantiated results and allows us to observe more nuanced patterns in consumer behavior.

A longer test duration would also allow us to select users to study based on concrete personas. The test could focus on one or many subjects depending on the ongoing needs of our client.

Lastly upon revisiting the study, we would utilize existing market research on consumer behavior pertaining to beverages. Doing this would allow us to design a better study for our client and have more nuanced design challenges.