Afinitty diagram (Gather and organize data)

The first step is to gather all of the data from our research in one place, let’s say, you and your teammates took all of your notes during the usability study on sticky notes. You now need to gather everyone sticky notes in one place.

Then it’s time to organize the data so that it’s easier to interpret or understand. One method you can use to organize data is called affinity diagramming. In an affinity is a feeling of like mindedness or compatibility towards something or someone. You had something important in common that made you feel closer to each other. An affinity diagram is a method of synthesizing that organizes data into groups with common themes or relationships. Affinity diagramming is a quick and easy way to gather observations during a usability study and synthesized data.

Making an affinity diagram

you need all of the observations from participants to be on sticky notes. So if you used spreadsheet note taking or took notes on a single piece of paper, you need to transfer all of the observations from participants into sticky notes. You can skip this step. If you took notes during the usability study on sticky notes in the first place, each participant observation should be on its own sticky notes. After all the interviews, you’ll have a whole stack of sticky notes, each with one observation.

Organize data

Now it’s time to organize, the sticky notes start To make 4 or 5 clusters. You can place these clusters on wall, window, or whiteboard. Your job is to bundle together sticky notes that have related ideas or themes. In order to do this, compare sticky notes one x one and ask yourself is the observation on the sticky notes similar to any of the other observations I’ve reviewed so far or is this observation different? Imagine you’re organizing your liked videos on youtube. Start by grabbing three videos on the youtube. Next look at each one to see what genre it is. Let’s say you picked to mystery videos and a comedy video. You now have two clusters, mystery mistery and comedy. When you choose the next video, a cooking tutorial, you’ll decide if it goes into one of the clusters you already have or if you need to start a new cluster. You’ll continue this process until you have gone through all of your sticky notes as you wrap up, take a step back and look through the clusters again. Perhaps you’ll want to move a few sticky notes from one cluster to another. Keep in mind that there will always be a few sticky notes left over at the end that don’t relate to other ideas. You can put them aside if they don’t relate to any clusters. So what makes affinity diagramming useful for synthesizing data? By putting sticky notes and clusters, you can easily spot themes across all of the observations from your usability study. It’s also easy to shift ideas around between themes because you can peel and stick the notes in different locations. One more note about affinity diagramming. Although it’s highly visual in nature, affinity diagramming can be adapted for participants who are visually impaired. For instance, during an affinity diagramming session, a participant with a visual impairment could dictate what to write on each sticky note. After stickies are grouped together, someone could read each sticky note out loud and ask participants to suggest groupings.