Affinity Mapping and Matrix Prioritization: A UX Tool to Create a Product’s Game Plan

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Quick Design

5 min readAug 19, 2019

Ever run into a situation where pie-in-the-sky design ideas are being requested, worked on, but are later found out to not be technically feasible? Or maybe the finished design looks great and all the initial criteria is met, only to discover several blind spots that were only identified too late and only after pushing your product live. This is where Affinity Mapping and a Prioritization Matrix — tools used in UX to help holistically define and prioritize ideas, come in handy.

Whether you are in the UX world or not, these are tools can be made applicable to your line of work to help make sure that key players on a project are in agreement of priorities on any project or campaign.

What is Affinity Mapping?

Affinity, as defined by dictionary.com:

Inherent likeness or agreement; close resemblance or connection.

Similar to organizing kitchen utensils by similar groups of silverware into a greater system of kitchen organization, affinity mapping helps you organize similar groups of ideas into a greater system of big-picture ideas.

What is a Prioritization Matrix?

A matrix or graph comprised of an x-axis and y-axis. The axis will be plotted as the following:

x=(from left to right)“Need to Have” to “Nice to Have”
y = (from top to bottom) “High Effort” to “Low Effort”

By plotting the features that are necessary for basic functionality alongside what is technically the most feasible, we are able to define what our Minimum Viable Product or MVP is.

How to Start

1. Have a diverse set of participants

To do affinity mapping, it is best to collaborate with a unique group of people that will be working on your project. In the UX world, this can involve designers, developers, business analysts, product owners, and most importantly — any key decision-makers. This helps achieve a holistic and bird’s eye view of an issue as well as potential solutions — both analog and digital.

2. Prepare and Gather Tools

Make sure to have some sharpies, post-its, voting dots, and a large pad of paper. Some of these items will be further explained in the next step of the agenda.

3. Have an Agenda

Affinity mapping is an ideating activity, and the activity is usually broken into several parts. It’s important to keep activities relatively short as the goal is to create rapid ideation and rapid progress.

To do this, I kept most activities around 5–15 min in a group of less than 10. In order for the time limits to be effective, group sizes should also vary from 5–10 people.

Below is an example of an agenda I had created for my team:

Agenda Breakdown

Kickoff — Take the time to explain the purpose of the meeting and activity.
Ideate (5 min) — Participants use sharpies and sticky notes to write as many ideas pertaining to the project or product. Sky’s the limit here and there are no wrong answers, just possibilities.
Post Ideas and Discuss (10 min) — Participants share and post up their ideas on the wall. Overlapping or similar ideas is a common thing to recognize at this point and will help in the actual affinity mapping portion of this process.
Voting Dots (10 min) – Once ideas have been explained, give participants two sets of three voting dots. One set should indicate features or ideas that are “Need to Haves” — features that are necessary for the product to have basic functionality. And one set should indicate “Nice to Haves” — features that aren’t necessary upfront but would be a nice bonus to have. Below is an example of a legend I created for my team. Four colors sets were used since there weren’t enough for just two sets from two color sets.

Affinity Map (15 min) — Have participants collectively organize the ideas that have just been posted on the wall. Feel free to start labeling the groups that are being formed. Below is an example of the grouping that was created from the activity I facilitated.

Priority Matrix (15 min) — Take the ideas that have votes on them, and plot them on the matrix example listed earlier. Refer to the legend of which voter dots indicate “Need to Have” and which voter dots indicate “Nice to Have” as a guide of where to plot, but also feel free to adjust if your group is learning that a “Nice to Have” is actually a “Need to Have” and vice versa.

Defining MVP Features (10 min) — Take a look at what ideas have been collected in that bottom left quadrant. Those features will create minimum viability for your product (MVP) and will be the most technically feasible features to develop.

Benefits:

Affinity Mapping and a Prioritization Matrix allows for people from various teams and backgrounds to collaborate and define issues and opportunities from a holistic view. These solutions can be both digital and analog as our team defined opportunities that went beyond just our digital app, but possible marketing solutions, training solutions, etc. These UX tools can also be applied to any other team or issue that is looking to get well-rounded solutions through a fun and effective cross-collaboration session.

Comment below what mapping or prioritization your team has. Do you have similar methods and plot different things? Do you have a completely different system? Let me know!