The Affinity Diagram for UX Purposes:
What better time to fully understand an Affinity Diagram in all its glory than right now since this is where I find myself in the overall process of my user research. It’s time to take those recorded user interviews and begin to digitize all of the bits and pieces into a marinated stew of tasks, steps, interactions, opinions and insights. Seems like an overwhelming undertaking for me since this exercise has me straining mental muscles I have never used before in such a way. I have always embraced entropy to certain extent or at least as far as I could get away with it. I have never basked in categorization of data — I was always more of an intuition guy that liked to let my imagination be my guide. So as a bit of an preparatory dialogue with myself in an effort to better equip myself in this collaborative effort, I have decided to investigate and then answer those common questions that humans always ask in a yearning to understand what is being asked of them.
What: An Affinity Diagram is a useful tool to take information or user research you have gathered in the field and convert that into a conceptual framework
Why: Ultimately to help pull out relationships that exist lurking behind large amounts of data so as to gain new patterns of thinking and hopefully reveal nuances and spawn new ideas about the user’s perspectives.
When: In cases where a team needs to come to a creative concensus on how to structure gathered information by into digestable and understandable contextually linked chunks.
How: By recording all of user research which could be ideas, comments, opinions, issues, actions, decisions, barriers, interactions, etc on post it notes or cards and begin to organize them into associated groupings based on natural relationships.
The Result (hopefully): A departure from entrenched and biased thinking that will enable a team to fleshout user centric ideas in a creative way to help start shaping an ideal user experience for primary and secondary users.
Keywords to help explain the components and interworkings of a UX Based Affinity Diagrams: visual, framework, cluster, context, ideas, attitudes, opinions, concerns, user-centric, teamwork, collaborative, communal, organize, patterns, collective, process, sorting, tasks, understandable, themes, reorder, structure, decisions, concepts, analyze, artifacts, drill down, match, arrange, headings, evaluate, insights, emerge, focus, categories, hierarchy, groupings, groups, subgroups, observations.
