Two common use cases for affinity mapping are synthesizing qualitative research findings and analyzing ideas in early design ideation. Some form of voting is common at this stage—you can use markers or stickers or let each person weigh in on which ideas should be carried forward or given priority. Also, more people means more perspectives. An affinity map, also known as an affinity diagram, gives designers a complete picture of their early research process. Slightly different methods are used depending on whether the purpose of the workshop is to analyze usability-test findings or organize new ideas. It also gets stakeholders engaged and invested in your UX research … (But these comments add time to the meeting, so you may choose to skip this instruction.). If the note doesn’t fit under any category, think of a new one. Online Affinity Diagram mapping process. 14. Affinity diagramming is a useful tool for UX designers, product managers, and organizational leaders to come up with ideas and turn them into insights, and then, into an action plan. Make sure everyone understands the topic, and brainstorm ideas on Post-it notes for 10 minutes. Affinity diagrams are the ideal brainstorming tool for projects involving large teams, large data sets, or a wide range of ideas. Depending on your timeframe and how thorough you want to get, you can find the balance that works for your project. Affinity Mapping and a Prioritization Matrix allows for people from various teams and backgrounds to collaborate and define issues and opportunities from a … We’ll all need to work hard and quickly to make that happen. One way to do this is to continue sorting. But you want to find connections that might be valuable for you, so keep in mind the research questions or business goals that drove your research. “Affinity diagrams” are a UX designer’s tool, used to capture and synthesise qualitative data. Learn how to incorporate Affinity Designer into your own UX design process. 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. Imagine that the team identifies fifteen reasons. Next time you are struggling with a big challenge, try using brainstorming and affinity mapping to tackle it with your team! Choose a room that has walls on which sticky notes can be attached (e.g., glass or whiteboard). In particular, anyone who: I used to think that, as a user researcher, my job was to make the information I collected about users as understandable and digestible as possible for my team. Affinity diagramming is also known as affinity mapping, collaborative sorting, snowballing, or even card sorting. When you interview, make sure you make the person feel comfortable. Just like a brainstorm, the goal is to get a bunch of sticky notes on the wall. Group items with like items. She helps to improve their UX strategy, increase their UX maturity, and derive experiences that useful, simple, and surpass business goals. Customer journey mapping 3. If you’ve ever seen a photo of a bunch of designers standing in front of sticky notes on a wall, an affinity map is what you were probably looking at. If it’s related to the first, put it next to it to start to form a cluster. It helps the team gain a shared understanding after each user. The term “saturate” relates to the method in which everyone covers or saturates the “space” with images an… When the time limit is up, have everyone post their ideas on the wall. The affinity diagram is a business tool used to organize ideas and data. Learn how to incorporate Affinity Designer into your own UX design process. on Look for a category under which it would make sense. Rikke Dam & Teo Siang at The Interaction D esign Foundation describe affinity mapping as “…a method which can help you gather large amounts of data and organise them into groups or themes based on their relationships.” Typically, this is done with post-it notes along a wall or a whiteboard. There is no should use this or that. 9/1/2020 Affinity Designer is a cross-platform vector design tool that's simple, streamlined, and easy to use for UX, UI, and responsive web design. This meeting should take not more than 3 (usually 2) hours. Let’s work to get these sorted within 30 minutes (or however much time you feel it will take). However if it needs to be performed within the people who are not at in place or cant be for somewhat reason, you can run it through a tool. User Testing,Ideation,research observers,design thinking,Research Methods,usability research,UX Teams, 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods, Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking, Between-Subjects vs. Within-Subjects Study Design, UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet, The Lawn Mower Eyetracking Pattern for Scanning Comparison Tables, Help and Documentation: The 10th Usability Heuristic, UX Guidelines for Augmented-Reality Shopping Tools, Contextual Inquiry: Inspire Design by Observing and Interviewing Users in Their Context, User Control and Freedom (Usability Heuristic #3), The KJ Method: A Technique for Analyzing Data Derived from Japanese Ethnology, ‘But You Tested with Only 5 Users!’: Responding to Skepticism About Findings From Small Studies, Collaborative Agile Activities Reduce Silos and Align Perspectives, Avoid Leading Questions to Get Better Insights from Participants, Usability Test, Even When You Know the Answer, Journey Mapping to Understand Customer Needs, Marketing Email UX - User Research Methodology, How to Recruit Participants for Usability Studies, Conversion Rate Optimization and Applied UX Research, observations or ideas from a research study, ideas that surface in design-ideation meetings, During a usability session, the facilitator and the. 19. (However, in UX, ‘card sorting’ stands for a very specific research method for determining the IA of a site or application. Again, spend some time looking at each idea and sorting them into  groups according to whatever themes you find useful. If you can’t understand a note, move it to the “?” category. While I still feel these things are true, I have learned that insulating stakeholders from all the false starts, design ideas, details and messy notes taken in tests does them a disservice. Affinity diagrams help you organize information into groups of similar items to then analyze qualitative data or observations. Karl Ulrich, 2003. Affinity diagrams rely on Post-It notes to create the visual map. 18. — Balanced Scorecard Institute . This is a method to visually organize ideas and find cohesion in the team’s concepts. An Affinity Diagram is a tool that gathers large amounts of language data (ideas, opinions, issues) and organizes them into groupings based on their natural Relationships. Tools like LucidChart, Upboard, and Stormboard are all worth exploring for more team-based affinity mapping. By now the stickies are usually falling down, which signals the meeting’s end. The voting rules differ by team and local preferences, but usually people are allowed to assign multiple importance points (up to their allocated maximum) to a single issue if they think it’s crucial enough. One method that helps teams collaboratively analyze research findings as well as ideas from ideation sessions is affinity diagramming. — Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research Book. For example, an attendee with 3 votes could assign two votes to one issue and one vote to another. The Society for Applied Anthropology. However, if your team is distributed, Conceptboard’s online whiteboard and digital sticky notes is the perfect tool to ensure your team can collaborate just as effectively online. To understand how to synthesize qualitative research—such as user interviews, ethnographic observation, or usability testing—with an affinity map, let’s imagine a scenario. It’s also helpful to bring out some treats at key times — for example, while people are sorting categories into subcategories. This list includes a few of the tried and trusty UX tools we use daily, as well as others that we’ve heard good things about. People have been grouping data into groups based on natural relationships for thousands of years; however, the term affinity diagram was devised by Jiro Kawakita in the 1960s and is sometimes referred to as the KJ Method. Definition: Affinity diagramming refers to organizing related facts into distinct clusters. When working solo, I like to use this free Sketch template. 32. As an individual method, it’s a relatively quick way to pull out insights from your research notes and overcome your tendency to favor certain narratives (i.e.confirmation bias). Stand by it and read each finding, then summarize the category. When it comes to UX, understanding your users’ needs can be complicated. She is the creator of NN/g's Intranet Design Annual and UX Certification Program. Take photos of the walls. Make sure to take pictures of your wall—and consider translating the map into a document that you can share later with participants or stakeholders. Prioritize and select which ideas the team should pursue in more detail moving forward. 20. During an ideation workshop, attendees or the workshop facilitator write each idea on a sticky note. Now it’s time to put everything together and find the patterns across your interviews. In it, users sort index cards with category names and commands written on them.) Each attendee gets a certain number (usually 3) of importance points which she can assign to the items she thinks most need to be addressed. The ratings are totaled, and the overall score is used to rank the ideas. Business and design teams have used affinity diagrams for a long time to organize ideas, complex information and even customer feedback into themes or groups. This method forces people to think in terms of each design’s worth, and usually one design emerges more valuable than the other(s). Organizing the notes in groups. Don’t be too discriminating at this point. Prioritization of issues for agile environments. In short, the affinity diagram shows the common issues, themes, and scope of the customer problems and needs in one place. Each sticky note contains information came out of my user research. The technique was invented by Jiro Kawakita, a Japanese anthropologist. Describe what people should be doing at each phase of the workshop. Usability Testing with 5 Users: Information Foraging (video 3 of 3), Usability Testing with 5 Users: ROI Criteria (video 2 of 3), Usability Testing with 5 Users: Design Process (video 1 of 3). To educate other team members, involve them in design, build consensus, and increase sensitivity to usability issues, get them involved in taking notes, sorting them, and discussing them rather that protecting them from these processes. One other consideration is that affinity mapping is most typically thought of as an in-person activity. In UX, the method is used to organize research findings or to sort design ideas in ideation workshops. At the same time, know that the more notes that end up on the wall, the longer it’ll take you to sort them. Have you ever involved stakeholders in design critiques, ideation sessions, or meetings devoted to analyzing research findings only to find them uninterested? Then we’ll walk through what it looks like in two common use cases: pulling out insights from research notes and organizing design ideas. Whether you’re synthesizing research or ideating, working alone or in a group, or collaborating in-person or remotely—affinity mapping is an active and visual approach that often helps turn up ideas and solutions you may not have come by otherwise. The resulting clusters and the determined priorities are the end product of the affinity diagramming. Consider creating a few category names to help get the sorting started. This is an obvious one but still worth elaborating. In this case affinity diagrams are sometimes referred to as the KJ method or an affinity map. And were the ideas and research findings ever ignored or forgotten? It is a handy tool in a designer’s belt, often employed for data analysis and brainstorming. Each design idea is rated on a 1- to-7 scale for each of these three attributes: 1) whether the team has used that design before (usually newer items are considered better); 2) whether the idea is useful and it solves the problem; and 3) how feasible it is for the team to implement the idea. If it’s not related, put it further away to start a new cluster. Pernice is accomplished at evaluating and managing design situations, and crafting with a team the most fitting research methods, and converting this analysis into insights and outstanding designs. With that, you should know how to do it right. An affinity diagram, sometimes also known as a cluster map, is used to organize information and is the output of affinity mapping. All team members should put their ideas generated in the lensed brainstorming activity up on the wall. This is a heads-down activity. Don’t be idle. 36. Just before the meeting begins, enlist some help and put all notes on the wall, in no order. Stick these category names high on a blank part of a wall, so many notes can fit below. 4. It enables you to summarize results quickly when you plan to make design changes between user tests — for example, for rapid prototype testing with very early design iterations. In the end its all about the outputs. It’s a great way to immerse designers and stakeholders in user research by letting them hold quotations and observations in their hands. (However, in UX, ‘card sorting’ stands for a very specific research method for determining the IA of a site or application. In a nutshell, affinity mapping is putting a bunch of sticky notes with ideas on them on a wall and then grouping them based on their similarities (affinities). To record it: 34. Affinity diagrams are an inductive technique where the small units (An idea or a problem) are created first and then grouped together forming bigger groups. 200+ Awesome UX Tools For UX Designers Affinity Diagramming in UX 33. 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