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| Criterion |  Product Discovery Smoke Test |  Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |  Architecture arc42 |  Product Discovery Fake Door Test |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | 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. | arc42 structures architecture knowledge so teams can document system, decisions, and risks consistently. The template builds a living understanding of the architecture instead of scattered notes. | When demand is still unclear, it measures interest in a feature before it is built. It separates real behavior from polite agreement and deliberately keeps build effort small. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Medium | Low | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-5 Tage | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional | 1-2 Tage | 1-5 Tage |
Participantsdifferent | Nutzertraffic | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation | 1-4 | Nutzertraffic |
Formatdifferent | Async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Async |
Outputdifferent | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions | Architecture Document, Context View, Runtime View, Deployment View | Click Data, Interest Signal, Learning Decision |
Tagsno overlap | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks | ArchitectureDocumentationCommunication | ValidationExperimentsDemandDiscovery |