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| Criterion |  UX Research Contextual Inquiry |  UX Research Diary Study |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Engineering Failure Scenario Analysis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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 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. | In critical processes, it is not enough to plan only for the normal case. Failure Scenario Analysis looks at the path into failure and shows which failures, chains, and control gaps cause the most damage. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Medium | Low | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-3 Wochen | 1-4 Wochen | 20–45 min | 1-3 h |
Participantsdifferent | 4-12 Beobachtungen | 5-20 | Small cross-functional group | 3-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Async | Workshop | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | Field Notes, Workflow Insights, Pain Points | Diary Entries, Longitudinal Patterns, Experience Timeline | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Failure Scenarios, Risk Notes, Control Gaps, Test and Response Actions |
Tagsno overlap | UX researchObservationContext | UX researchTrackingBehavior | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | FailureResilienceRisk |