In my first User Research project, I knew Affinity Diagram. At that time, I felt interested but not familiar with it. With my gradual exploration in this field, I realized its importance in the design process.
What is an Affinity Diagram?
The affinity diagram organized a large amount of data and grouped them into several categories based on their relationships. It’s easy to get confused facing a lot of mixed data which might from interviews, questionnaires, brainstorms, usability testing, and stakeholders' opinions. This method plays an important role in analyzing data.
One benefit is that the categories emergent naturally rather than deliberately made. The relationship among data dominates the whole process. Sometimes will arise surprising results.
When to Use it?
I divided the usage situations into two types: Ideation and Evaluation.
Ideation: At the beginning of a project, we usually do user research, usability testing, brainstorms, and collect related information from diverse channels. In this stage, we try to explore the potential problems or challenges that can be solved or designed in the following process.
Evaluation: Now we have a prototype that can be tested, although it might be low-fidelity or just a concept. Our goal is to find if our concept can be accepted or satisfied by our users and what needs to be improved.
Make an Affinity Diagram
- Write each data on a separate sticky note
Each piece of data should be short, easy to understand, and only represent one certain idea. Because different points may belong to different categories, it’s easy to move a post-it with only a single point of view.
- Build Affinity Diagram Wall
Take one post-it and put it on the wall. Then take the next post-it and consider the relationship with the first one. If they are similar, they are put together, otherwise, it forms a different group. All post-its are placed in this way, fitting into an existing group or creating new groups. During this process, all team members do it together but without discussing. If some post-its are considered to belong to different groups, they can be replicated and put into multiple groups.
- Discuss with teammates about those groups
Go through all groups and discuss if everyone agrees on this category.
- Name each group
Give each group a name to help create an information structure and discover themes. Now we can find some main aspects of problems that users care about. We can even create a hierarchy of information. For example, group A shows users love blue, group B shows users love circle. A big group contains A and B can represent visual preference.
- Rank the groups according to the importance
It’s hard to cover all ideas in one iteration of the design. Firstly, consider which criteria you decide to use to rank those themes. It can be user experience, market competition, or stakeholders’ profit. Then we can get more specific and urgent problems.
Affinity Diagram Exercise
I noticed this exercise example here. It’s interesting to practice the process of Affinity Diagram.
Question: What are the barriers to on-time delivery of medications?
Tool: https://miro.com/
- All brainstormed and researched data:
2. Group ideas:
3. Name each group:
