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| Criterion |  UX Research User Interviews |  Decision Making Constraint Analysis |  Decision Making Trade-off Analysis |  Decision Making Decision 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. | 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. | With limited resources, quality, speed, cost, and risk almost always compete with each other. Trade-off Analysis makes these tensions explicit and prevents decisions from producing hidden side effects. | 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 | Low | Low | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 30–60 min per interview | 30-90 min | 45-120 min | 30-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | 1 participant per interview | 2-8 | 2-8 | 1-6 |
Formatsame | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Interview Notes, Themes, Insight Summary | Constraint List, Hard/Soft Classification, Option Impact Notes, Decision Boundaries | Trade-off Matrix, Criteria List, Decision Rationale, Accepted Downsides | Decision Tree, Option Map, Assumption List |
Tagsno overlap | QualitativeResearchCustomerDiscovery | ConstraintsDecisionPlanningOptions | TradeoffsDecisionCriteriaOptions | DecisionTreeOptions |