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| Criterion |  UX Research Diary Study |  Product Strategy Lean Canvas |  UX Research Contextual Inquiry |  Operations 5 Whys |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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 an early product bet still has too many open points, it brings target group, problem, and assumptions into a single view. It condenses the idea so core risks become nameable. | 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. | For a single, hard-to-explain deviation, the method exposes the causal chain behind the visible symptom. It keeps the cause open until a controllable condition emerges instead of a mere description. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Medium | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 1-4 Wochen | 45-90 min | 1-3 Wochen | 15-30 min |
Participantsdifferent | 5-20 | 1-6 | 4-12 Beobachtungen | 2-6 |
Formatdifferent | Async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | Diary Entries, Longitudinal Patterns, Experience Timeline | Lean Canvas, Core Assumptions, Experiment Backlog | Field Notes, Workflow Insights, Pain Points | Root cause notes, Countermeasures |
Tagsno overlap | UX researchTrackingBehavior | StartupLeanAssumptionsBusiness model | UX researchObservationContext | Root causeIncidentLeanProblem solving |