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| Criterion |  UX Research Card Sorting |  Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |  Operations Fishbone Diagram |
|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When content only makes sense internally and users can't find the structure again, card sorting exposes their mental order. Terms, groups, and naming are then aligned with the target group's expectations. | ARID examines how well developers can work with a technical design. It focuses on a part of the system that can still be revised, between the architecture overview and the detailed specification. | When a problem has several possible contributing factors, the method sorts causes by cause areas. It prevents an initial hunch from blocking the view of other plausible drivers. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 20-45 min | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional | 30-60 min |
Participantsdifferent | Based on research question | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | Content groups, Label set, IA hypotheses | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions | Fishbone Diagram, Cause Categories, Investigation Backlog |
Tagsno overlap | Information architectureNavigationStructure | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks | Root causeQualityOperations |
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