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| Criterion |  UX Research Contextual Inquiry |  Decision Making Constraint Analysis |  UX Research Diary Study |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When work processes are known only from accounts and the real context stays hidden, Contextual Inquiry makes behavior at the workplace visible. Observation and follow-up questions together show how people actually work, get interrupted, and improvise. | When an initiative stalls, the limit often lies not in the idea but in hard or soft boundary conditions. Constraint Analysis separates these limits and shows which of them can actually be shaped. | When experiences build up over days or weeks and a single session cannot capture them, Diary Study records the course of everyday life. Recurring triggers, moods, and habits become visible this way, beyond the sharpness of memory. | In early initiatives with many uncertainties, planning quickly turns too optimistic. A pre-mortem makes the expected failure visible in advance and sharpens the view of causes, gaps, and countermeasures. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Low | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 1-3 Wochen | 30-90 min | 1-4 Wochen | 20–45 min |
Participantsdifferent | 4-12 Beobachtungen | 2-8 | 5-20 | Small cross-functional group |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Async | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | Field Notes, Workflow Insights, Pain Points | Constraint List, Hard/Soft Classification, Option Impact Notes, Decision Boundaries | Diary Entries, Longitudinal Patterns, Experience Timeline | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log |
Tagsno overlap | UX researchObservationContext | ConstraintsDecisionPlanningOptions | UX researchTrackingBehavior | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning |