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| Criterion |  UX Research Diary Study |  UX Research Contextual Inquiry |  Decision Making Constraint Analysis |  Decision Making Decision Tree |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | 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. | 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. | For decisions with follow-on paths and dependencies, a linear comparison is often not enough. A Decision Tree shows how options branch under conditions and which consequences hang on each branch. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Medium | Low | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-4 Wochen | 1-3 Wochen | 30-90 min | 30-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | 5-20 | 4-12 Beobachtungen | 2-8 | 1-6 |
Formatdifferent | Async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Diary Entries, Longitudinal Patterns, Experience Timeline | Field Notes, Workflow Insights, Pain Points | Constraint List, Hard/Soft Classification, Option Impact Notes, Decision Boundaries | Decision Tree, Option Map, Assumption List |
Tagsno overlap | UX researchTrackingBehavior | UX researchObservationContext | ConstraintsDecisionPlanningOptions | DecisionTreeOptions |