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| Criterion |  UX Research Personas |  UX Research User Interviews |  Operations Root Cause Analysis |  Operations 5 Whys |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When target groups stay too vague and teams talk about the same people differently, personas create a shared, solid picture of usage. Condensed profiles make needs, contexts, and differences tangible enough for decisions. | When teams derive needs only from assumptions and real motives are missing, user interviews give direct access to behavior and meaning. Conversations from the target group's everyday life make patterns, tensions, and open questions solidly visible. | When a problem keeps recurring and the cause stays unclear, the method exposes the underlying mechanism. It separates symptom, guess, and robust explanation from one another. | 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 | Low | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 1-3 Tage | 30–60 min per interview | 1-4 h | 15-30 min |
Participantsdifferent | Internes Team | 1 participant per interview | 3-8 | 2-6 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | Persona Profiles, Needs Summary, Scenario Notes | Interview Notes, Themes, Insight Summary | Problem Statement, Cause Hypotheses, Confirmed Causes, Action Plan | Root cause notes, Countermeasures |
Tagsno overlap | ResearchCustomerSynthesis | QualitativeResearchCustomerDiscovery | Root causeProblem solvingQualityIncident | Root causeIncidentLeanProblem solving |