Build tangible ideas in a sea of ambiguity through affinity mapping
A multi-purpose tool for multiple contexts
One of my favorite tools to use for work is affinity mapping. You’ve probably heard or seen this method before and it’s no secret that a lot of UXers love this part of the process. It’s a malleable and multi-purpose tool, so let’s talk about affinity mapping and its myriad of uses.
What is Affinity Mapping?
Affinity mapping is a method or tool to use when you have a lot of data, ideas or insights. This is specially useful early in the project when you or your teams have a multitude of ideas or thoughts and lots of ambiguity. It also helps when you’re grabbing ideas from multiple days of research as it keeps them tangible and easily accessible to an entire team. If you’re working in a team they show their full potential as it gives people a chance to build and collaborate over another person’s initial idea. This helps avoid the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) behavior and gives everyone a voice in the creation of ideas.
How do you do it?
Affinity mapping is relatively low-tech. A basic affinity mapping exercise requires post-its or sticky notes and pens to write with. These simple tools help make it multi-purpose and malleable to different needs.
- Start by writing your ideas, insights and observations on each post-it. As you write them down, post each one up on a surface whether it be a wall, a window or a whiteboard. Don’t think too much about your ideas at the moment, the important part here is to write them all down and write as many of them down as you can.
- When you’ve finished writing all your thoughts into separate sheets and probably filled your entire window, it will be time to step back and analyze your ideas.
- You will likely find common or connected ideas within your wall of post-its. Use those and group the notes into themes and categories.
It’s a very simple strategy but there are multiple ways this can be modified to fit your current context. If you’re doing the exercise with the group, it might be useful to use a time-limit when you write down ideas. If you’re doing it with a group online, tools such as linoit are useful as it allows you to create digital post-its online that remote teams can all contribute to. You can also combine it with an empathy map (using a see, think, feel, do headers to categorize findings and themes).
What we’ve used them for
Organizing Interview Insights
It’s pretty common for UXers to have tons of notes lying around in notebooks from user interviews. You usually get loads of deep data from interviews, but trying to find connections and patterns between them is something that everyone needs help with.
We started with data on observations and insights from users of the platform. These came from interviews, feedback forms and survey answers. After a few minutes we’d literally almost filled up an entire window with our findings.
Bringing in another researcher to try to fill-in the gaps and see connections, we ended up finding themes to report and present to stake holders.
Creating Presentations
A couple of weeks ago I was asked at the last minute to replace another speaker for talk on using Sketch with teams. I took it as a chance to represent the team and the office and the work we’ve put into building our design ops. Our problem was I didn’t know where to start.
I gave myself a few minutes to write down important aspects of how we use sketch as a team. After a few minutes I had a couple of notes filled with examples, ideas and themes to make a presentation about. This is where I start organizing similar items or items that can work together to build an idea. With my ideas organized I had an outline to build a presentation on.
Writing Articles
Writing articles have been quite hard for me since the Kalibrr Design Blog started. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve written anything of substantial value on medium so organizing my thoughts for a meaningful essay has been a big challenge.
For last week’s article I had an initial idea to talk about how UX professionals have become too self-centered and forgotten how to collaborate. My problem though was I didn’t know how to build that idea.
Same process, I started writing out ideas and personal experiences of which I pruned and organized into a sequential outline.This became the backbone or map I used to write the article afterwards.
Becoming more organized.
Affinity maps are a very powerful tool in a creative’s toolkit. Since I’ve started using affinity maps in various tasks I’ve found my thoughts to be more organized. I’ve also been able to communicate my thoughts more clearly and succinctly. My writing has improved drastically since giving my essays form and order.
As designers, its quite easy to drown in the creativity that’s required with our jobs. But designers do not just create for creation’s sake, we need to be able to communicate our ideas clearly to stakeholders if we ever want them to take shape. Affinity maps are a great way to facilitate better communication between team members, as well as build more tangible ideas in a sea of ambiguity.
