How to create an affinity diagram
⭐️ Key takeaways
Affinity diagramming is a visual method you use to group chunks of data into meaningful insights. You do this by writing pieces of research data down on sticky notes and then grouping them with similar pieces of information with which they have an affinity.
Affinity diagrams help you understand large sets of data and visualize the relationships between different groups.
How to create an affinity diagram:
- Write down all of the qualitative data and direct quotes from your research onto sticky notes. If you wish, you can forego using paper and do this on your computer using software like Figma or Miro.
- After you’ve written all of your sticky notes out, either physically or digitally, start by grabbing a random sticky note and putting it up on a wall.
- Then grab another sticky note and ask yourself, “Is this sticky note like the one I just put up on the wall, or is it different?”
- If it’s similar to the first sticky, group it with the first, otherwise place it into a new group.
- Then, keep repeating by adding sticky notes to new or existing groups.
- Expect to change your mind and rearrange sticky notes several times based on affinities.
- After you’re done grouping everything, grab a different sticky note color, and give each group a name that accurately describes what the group is all about.
- You can then rank your groups by most important to least important based on what you have heard from user feedback.
📗 Assignment
Go to the Affinity diagram tab in the Figma workbook.
Then, create your own affinity diagram using the insights from the user interviews.
💬 Transcript
Hey, what's up Kickass Fam?
So, after conducting four to six user interviews, you now have a ton of data.
You have pages and pages of transcripts. While this is great, you might feel overwhelmed by the quantity of data.
So how are you going to organize it all? How are you going to make sense of it? By conducting an affinity map.
By the way after this lesson, you will complete your own affinity map in the Figma workbook.
So if you don't have your workbook yet, go download it at kickassux.com another free UX course page.
Alright, let's get started.
We are going to talk about how to synthesize the information from the user interviews, using an affinity diagram. We are going to cover:
What an affinity diagram is and why it's important.
How to create one for yourself.
And a few tips about affinity diagrams. Let's get to it.
Let's first start with what an affinity diagram is and why it's important.
We've all seen movies in which detectives use boards to link suspects and incidents.
Those boards are such a great way to connect the dots. In UX, affinity diagrams do just that.
Affinity diagramming is a visual method you use to group chunks of data into meaningful insights.
You do this by writing pieces of research data down on sticky notes and then grouping them with similar pieces of information, with which they have an affinity.
Affinity diagrams help you understand large sets of data and visualize the relationship between different groups.
So for example, let's say you just conducted six user interviews. You will have pages and pages of notes that are not truly valuable until you break the information piece-by-piece.
You make meaning out of these pieces by grouping similar data into categories to see broad user trends. And that's an affinity diagram in a nutshell.
Now that you have a general understanding of what an affinity diagram is, let's talk about how to create one for yourself.
Write down all the qualitative data and direct quotes from your research onto sticky notes. If you wish you can forgo using pen and paper and do this on your computer using software like FigJam, MURAL, or Miro.
After you've written all your sticky notes out, either physically or digitally, start by grabbing a random sticky note and putting it on the wall.
Then, grab another sticky note and ask yourself. " Is this sticky note like the one I just put on the wall or is it different?"
If it's similar to the first sticky, group it with the first, otherwise, place it into a new group.
Then, keep repeating by adding sticky notes to new or existing groups.
Expect to change your mind and rearrange sticky notes several times based on affinities.
It's important to point out that there is no right or wrong to affinity diagraming.
Our analytical minds want to be right.
Someone else could see the same data and come up with completely different groupings.
Let the data speak for itself.
After you're done grouping everything, grab a different sticky note color, and give each group a name that accurately describes what the group is all about.
You can then rank your group by most important to least important based on what you've heard from user feedback.
The goal of this entire activity is to categorize all of the stickies into groups, so you can make sense of the large amount of data by identifying patterns.
Then, start categorizing the sticky notes into groups. Again, don't be afraid to move sticky notes from group to group if you change your mind. Once you don't grouping all the sticky notes, add labels to each group. Boom. You've created an affinity diagram.
You now have most of your insights from your research in one place.
Finally, here are a few tips about affinity diagrams.
Be innocent and curious. Act like this is the first time you're seeing this information. Resist the temptation to assign group names too early.
Your preconceived notions will diminish your insights. You'll miss the true relationship between data points.
Expect to move stickies multiple times to different groups. Depending on the lens you look through, a sticky note might have an affinity with one group or another.
If you find this sticky note has equal affinity with multiple groups, create duplicates to put one in each group.
Don't worry about the amount of data you have, seemingly too much or too little.
This exercise will help you gain valuable insight into the data, no matter how many data points you have.
If you do have a ton of data, this is great.
This is the best way to break it down into understandable chunks.
Just take it one sticky at a time.
If you're doing this physically choose a surface that allows you to use all your sticky notes. You don't want to be restricted by space.
Include a small tag on each sticky note, that includes the name of the person or other identifying piece of information of where you got that data.
This way, you can see the similarities in the demographics between all the data points. Just make sure not to group your stickies based on that alone.
To recap, affinity diagrams are visual methods you use to group chunks of data into meaningful insights.
They allow you to understand large sets of data by visualizing the relationships between groups of information.
We also talked about how to create affinity diagrams.
And finally, we went over a few tips to build the most insightful affinity diagrams.
Once you're hired as a UX designer, you will create affinity diagrams with people on your team, like the product manager or UX researcher.
Doing this in a group helps you bring additional perspectives to the table, ensuring that the final groupings are well thought out.
When you conduct this with a team, the process of grouping stickies should be silent.
Doing this silently levels the playing field as no one can dominate the discussion.
You get a better result and it takes less time..
Alright, now it's your turn.
Go complete the affinity map in the Figma workbook.
If you don't have your workbook yet, go download it at kickassux.com under the free UX course page.
Happy mapping.
