Creating an Affinity Diagram

Introduction:

This week, our team dedicated our allotted three hour class time to one purpose: creating an affinity diagram. With four people on our team conducting several interviews, research, data, and ideas easily became too much to deal with. We organized everything by tiers. We started off with a general idea, three of which were unpleasurable, pleasurable, and time. From there, we made more and more tiers, grouping ideas by similarity so that we could see everything more clearly. Who knew it’d take three whole hours just to get everything sorted? But it was well worth it. With our team’s data and research all in one organized space, we are now able to hone in on our problem and how to solve it.

What We Each Thought:

This week was an exciting one as I got the opportunity to make an affinity diagram for the first time. It proved to be an invaluable experience, as we were able to observe our data from a holistic view and note patterns throughout. For example, we noticed three major divisions (as seen in the picture below, where our interviewees either talked about something that was pleasurable or unpleasurable to them while traveling around campus or discussed topics related to time, i.e. how traveling is viewed as a waste of time or how one doesn’t know where to go during hour gaps between classes. Amongst the variety of tiers, the one that interested me the most was an observation from the second tier that “The school doesn’t feel like a community.” Originally, during our interviews, we asked questions like “what are some pet peeves traveling around campus” or “recall a pleasurable experience while traveling on campus,” yet all of our interviewees brought up points that related to UCSD as a community. Some talked about the lack of school spirit while others talked about how the six­college system within UCSD felt disconnected with no interaction. This is a tier that I resonated with because I also feel the disconnect in our community and honestly did not start meeting people beyond my college until I checked out campus­ wide student organizations. This is a topic all of us are interested in and possibly something we will take on as the problem space to work on in the upcoming 5 weeks.

Take it easy,

Whale

Personally, I found this week’s activities to be very fulfilling. I’ve found a love for the design process as I’ve learned more and more about it with every class that I’ve taken, and this week I was able to delve in a little bit further. Building an affinity diagram for our problem space was challenging, but very rewarding. We stumbled across some roadblocks as we spent time working our way up the diagram, and we began to learn a little more about the direction in which each of us wanted to go. It was an interesting challenge to try to join together the ideas of all of the individuals, while not losing sight of our original intentions. However, it was extremely rewarding to materialize all of our user data and to begin to understand just what it is that our users need from us, as a UCSD redesign team. We began to learn a little more about our user cases, and we look forward to building personas and nailing down a problem space in this coming week. Our wall walk and our voting for hot ideas enabled us to make some concrete decisions and to take a step forward in a constructive direction. I’m stoked!

Cheers,

Ocelot

This week was a study in patience. Having no experience with a class like this, it’s frustrating to feel that we’re behind or simply too slow, but when done right, the design process takes a little time. The affinity diagram was interesting, with post­it notes tumbling off the wall every few minutes and all the excited chatter it was difficult to stay focused, but with help from the mentors, we were able to further narrow the scope of our problem space and though it may be slow, we are still moving forward.

Best,

Turtle

It’s crazy to think our team is already on our fifth week. I’m happy to find that our research is finally coming together. I never would have thought that data and research can drive design, but it surely does. Humans think and act a certain way.. all for a reason. And it’s our job to design the world around us to be as efficient as possible. It’s funny to think we’re our own humans.. studying humans.. to make things better for other humans. The data’s all set and organized, and I think we’re ready to create something beautiful.

Regards,

Lion

Here are some pictures of our process creating the Affinity Diagram: