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| Criterion |  UX Research Diary Study |  UX Research Contextual Inquiry |  Facilitation Six Thinking Hats |  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 a topic gets stuck too quickly in the same thinking mode, Six Thinking Hats deliberately separates the perspectives. This means facts, risks, creativity, and emotional signals get worked through one after another instead of mixed together. | 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. |
Complexitysame | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-4 Wochen | 1-3 Wochen | 45-90 min | 30-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | 5-20 | 4-12 Beobachtungen | 4-12 | 1-6 |
Formatdifferent | Async | Workshop + async | Workshop | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Diary Entries, Longitudinal Patterns, Experience Timeline | Field Notes, Workflow Insights, Pain Points | Perspective Notes, Decision Inputs, Action Items | Decision Tree, Option Map, Assumption List |
Tagsno overlap | UX researchTrackingBehavior | UX researchObservationContext | FacilitationOptionsDecision | DecisionTreeOptions |