Mastering Affinity Mapping: A UX Designer’s Guide to Structuring Information Architecture

TL;DR: If you’re short on time, skip the introductory background and head straight to the “Conducting a UX Workshop: Understanding the Need” section to dive directly into affinity mapping.

Introduction

As a UX design student and part of a project for my portfolio, I recently had the opportunity to collaborate with Recobee, a Bengaluru-based startup that specializes in solving the “what to watch” problem for movie lovers. Launched in 2018, Recobee has built a community-driven platform where users can share reviews and opinions and connect with fellow movie enthusiasts.
One of the upcoming star features of Recobee was its Account Analytics, designed to give users insight into their movie preferences and behaviors. However, in a recent focus group session, we discovered that the feature was falling short in meeting user expectations. This prompted the UX team to embark on a journey to revamp the analytics feature — and that’s where I came in, tasked with redesigning the Information Architecture (IA)

Understanding Analytics and its Shortcomings

Recobee Analytics was created with an aim to provide users with insights about their movie tastes and their movie activity they added on Recobee.
The following were the key insights available on account analytics:
- About Reviews written
-Movie Lists created
-Movies seen
-Followers Following

After rounds of UX research and discussion, the UX team came to the conclusion that there was a serious need to enhance the Analytics section.
- Had a lack of insights for users; whatever analysis was added was very common or it didn’t bring any new thoughts for the users.
- Thought it was built with the same purpose. The analytics section lacked the personalization aspect, which dropped the interest of users.
-User always had higher expectations from it because it was a premium feature, which weren’t fulfilled by the current flow.

Conducting UX Research

As Analytics Revamp became a priority in the product backlog, we started gathering important insights with previous focus group sessions and from stakeholders about the upcoming plan and their expectations. Simultaneously, competitive analysis was also conducted for inspirational insights.

Conducting a UX Workshop: Understanding the Need

As the sprint proceeded with UX research and insight gathering, it became important to have aligning perspectives to create a strong information architecture of the section and new possible flows.
Though after gathering enough insights to start on with the new redesign, one thing I was always concerned about was the biases that were shaping the redesign; thus, to avoid biases and have a sleek information architecture, we decided to conduct a quick UX workshop, which will aid this issue.

further exploring different workshops Affinity Mapping was considered best in this case as users were not accessible, and thus we thought of conducting a workshop within internal teams...

A Step-by-Step Guide to Affinity Mapping for UX Professionals

The Process-

As affinity mapping is done based on user insights, the internal UX team tries to find similarities between the insights and create patterns by grouping similar insights accordingly. It is commonly used in workshops to cluster user research findings, brainstorm ideas and feedback, and identify patterns and themes for better data management.

Getting approval from stakeholders

Getting approval from stakeholders becomes an important aspect that I learned from the Design System Enthusiast -Dan Mall.
“In order to establish a strong authority, it is crucial to include them in the process. Always approach people with the intention of assisting them rather than addressing them like a shopping list in order to get an easy buy-in., thus showcasing them how it can help us in our upcoming roadmap”

Getting prepared

• Getting a buy-in for Conducting UX workshop from the stakeholders
• Setting up Company and User Goals
• Considering Participants and Adding Invitation to all
• Making Presentation for explaining participants about affinity Mapping
• Adding Rules and Guides to follow during the session
• Recording the sessions and Gathering insights

Conducting UX Workshops

We conducted our affinity mapping using Figjam; a board was prepared and postaids were shared with participants. Thus, they were tasked with categorizing similar content and creating patterns based on their own thoughts.

Thus, all the participants were instructed about the guides to be followed for the task. After completing the workshop, the tasksheets were analyzed to understand the pattern between the drawn categories and sectioning by the participants to understand and reconstruct the information architecture. Thus, based on the insights, further actions were drawn.

A new look of the analytics section was ready

Based on the insights, measures were taken to redraw the structure and regroup section, making the Analytics section:
1. More Insightful and personalized
2. Making it worth a premium Feature
3. Easily navigable across all sections

Impact that it bought for me

Conducting the session personally helped me a lot to gain user and varied stakeholder perspectives about the product and also helped to avoid my personal biases that might have reduced the user satisfaction of our product. Other than this, it also helped me get better approvals and reduce feedback and issues on my design iteration, thus reducing overall iteration and design finalization time.