So, it’s important to have a leader to keep the meeting moving quickly and productively. It can be tiring to interpret and sort many notes, and attendees can lose interest if the meeting drags on. prioritizing each note, and determining the next steps in design or further research.After the test or the ideation session, the team has a workshop devoted to analyzing the notes by: During an ideation workshop, attendees or the workshop facilitator write each idea on a sticky note.ī.During a usability session, the facilitator and the observers write observations, findings, or ideas - each on one sticky note.In this step, team members write down ideas or facts on separate sticky notes. ideas that surface in design-ideation meetingsĪffinity diagramming in UX usually involves two steps:Ī.observations or ideas from a research study.While affinity diagramming as a method can be used by individuals as well as groups, in UX, it is used primarily by teams for quickly organizing: In it, users sort index cards with category names and commands written on them.) (However, in UX, ‘card sorting’ stands for a very specific research method for determining the IA of a site or application. Often used in UX, affinity diagramming is adapted from the KJ diagramming method (named after author Kawakita Jiro).ĭefinition: Affinity diagramming refers to organizing related facts into distinct clusters.Īffinity diagramming is also known as affinity mapping, collaborative sorting, snowballing, or even card sorting. One method that helps teams collaboratively analyze research findings as well as ideas from ideation sessions is affinity diagramming. However, in such UX workshops, it can be challenging to engage the team, and create order among diverse ideas and facts. Use in a Sentence: Affinity Mapping helped our team identify the relationship between common motivations and pain points from our research study.Have you ever involved stakeholders in design critiques, ideation sessions, or meetings devoted to analyzing research findings only to find them uninterested? And were the ideas and research findings ever ignored or forgotten? UX workshops have numerous benefits: educate people and make them empathic towards users, make stakeholders feel involved and responsible for ideas and research findings, create awareness of usability issues and design challenges, build common ground across all parties involved, and bring together many types of backgrounds and expertise. Interchangeable term: Affinity Diagramming Typically each cluster is named for easy reference. journeys, spectrums, similarities, differences, priorities, etc.) or according to their apparent affinity with other snippets. They can be organized by either a predetermined framework (e.g. The snippets are then moved into clusters of themes or categories based on the mapping objectives. Then they are displayed so they can all be seen in one view, evaluated equally, and assessed for their relationship to other snippets. What does it entail? First, all of the ideas or data points are synthesized into simple, separate, moveable snippets. It commonly takes place in brainstorming and strategic planning sessions, ideation workshops, and / or when analyzing and synthesizing data from a qualitative research study. When is it best used? Affinity Mapping’s purpose is to find patterns and themes within the data. It can take place in-person, using post-it notes on a wall, or digitally, using one of the many tools available. This process is commonly done with stakeholders who bring different perspectives to the exercise but can also be done individually. What is it? Affinity Mapping is a method of analyzing the relationship between ideas or data points, in order to help make sense of data.