In UX, the Affinity Diagramming method is used to organize research findings or to sort design ideas in ideation workshops.
Affinity Diagrams can help you cluster large bodies of information, facts, ethnographic research, ideas from brainstorms, user opinions, user needs, insights, design issues, etc.
This method will help you name, rank and understand relations between groups of information. With the groups you can visualize an overview and synthesize your findings. It’s important that you remember to sum up the major insights, user needs and pain points. Once you’ve done that you can focus on translating what you’ve organized and understood and put it into practice.
Steps to Creating and Affinity Diagram
- Record all notes or observations on individual cards or sticky notes
- Look for patterns and notes or observations that are related
- Create a group for each pattern or theme
- Give each theme or group a name
- Bonus: create a statement of what you learned about each group (this is often referred to as a Key Insight in UX research)
You will often find that the more interviews and research that you do, the clearer the trends will be when you start clustering.
Workshop Leader
It’s important to have a leader to keep the meeting moving quickly and productively. This person’s job is to:
- Communicate the agenda and goals.
- Describe what people should be doing at each phase of the workshop.
- Track and communicate time for each step.
- Get all the notes on the wall.
- Facilitate moving past any issues that may arise, such as helping the person who seems lost, or pairing people when one is idle and another is very busy.
Overall, an affinity diagram is helpful to organize many ideas into groups with common themes or relationships. They are tools for analyzing large amounts of data and discovering relationships which allow a design direction to be established based on the associations. This method may uncover significant hidden relationships.
