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| Criterion |  UX Research Card Sorting |  Product Discovery Smoke Test |  Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |  Growth A/B Testing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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. | When demand only needs to be roughly verified, it tests interest with minimal effort. It measures whether people would take a next step at all. | 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 two variants compete, discussions quickly decide by taste rather than effect. A/B Testing checks behavior under controlled conditions and separates real improvement from chance or expectation effects. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Low | Medium | High |
Timedifferent | 20-45 min | 1-5 Tage | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional | 1-4 Wochen |
Participantsdifferent | Based on research question | Nutzertraffic | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation | 1-6 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Async | Workshop + async | Async |
Outputdifferent | Content groups, Label set, IA hypotheses | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions | Experiment results, Decision log, Learning summary |
Tagsno overlap | Information architectureNavigationStructure | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks | ExperimentsGrowthAnalyticsValidation |