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Criterion
Paper illustration of two people facing each other, speech bubbles and an open interview notebook.
UX Research
User Interviews
Paper illustration for Causal Factor Analysis.
Operations
Causal Factor Analysis
Paper illustration for Current Reality Tree
Systems Thinking
Current Reality Tree
Purposedifferent
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.For an event with a complicated course, the method breaks down the contributing factors along the timeline. It shows how conditions, decisions, and reactions together produce a course of events.A Current Reality Tree condenses many symptoms into a few causal chains. The method makes visible which core problems drive several negative effects at once.
Complexitydifferent
LowHighHigh
Timedifferent
30–60 min per interview2-6 h2-6 h
Participantsdifferent
1 participant per interview3-103-8
Formatdifferent
Workshop + asyncWorkshop + asyncWorkshop
Outputdifferent
Interview Notes, Themes, Insight SummaryEvent Timeline, Causal Factor Chart, Cause List, Corrective ActionsCurrent Reality Tree, Core Problems, Intervention Ideas
Tagsno overlap
QualitativeResearchCustomerDiscovery
CausalityIncidentRoot causeTimeline
Systems thinkingRoot causeConstraintsCausality
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Often compared together

Methods with strong topical overlap with the current selection, not yet in the comparison.

Paper illustration for Theory of Constraints Thinking Process.
Systems Thinking
Theory of Constraints Thinking Process
Affinity Diagramming
UX Research
Affinity Diagramming
Paper illustration of Barrier Analysis with its method-specific working model.
Operations
Barrier Analysis