How to use Affinity Diagram to synthesize your User Research.
What is an Affinity Diagram?
An affinity diagram is a tool often used to organize data and ideas. Affinity diagrams help you organize information into groups of similar items to then analyze qualitative data or observations.
Business and design teams have used affinity diagrams for a long time to organize ideas, complex information and even customer feedback into themes or groups. For UX researchers, affinity diagrams are often used for analyzing and synthesizing user research findings by patterns and themes.
Why Use an Affinity Diagram?
Affinity diagrams are a great way to make sense of qualitative user research or customer feedback. Unlike quantitative data which is expressed in numbers and counts, qualitative user research is often analyzed by creating connections between observations or finding patterns and themes in the data. This process in user research is called thematic analysis.
Teams will often use an affinity diagram to create groups, or themes, of user research data from things like contextual inquiry, user interviews and field studies. From there they can deeper analyze those themes and groups to uncover insights from their user research efforts.
User interviews, ethnography and field study often provide a large amount of rich qualitative data. Doing affinity diagrams also known as Affinity Maps will help you find patterns, create themes and figure out what you learned from qualitative research by quickly grouping data and finding connections between those groups quickly and effectively.
Steps to Creating an Affinity Diagram
- Gather and collect all interview notes, transcripts, takeaways, or other user research information you have collected. Next, pull out the most notable takeaways and add them as sticky notes on your Affinity Board. (I prefer to use Mural when doing Affinity Diagram Sessions remotely.)
2. Next, organize the sticky notes together into groups of similar notes. (When working as a team a brief conversation around the format and goals of your affinity diagramming process.) Pro Tip: Set a time limit for sorting information into groups.
3. Next, give each of those groups a name or label to represent what that group means:
4. Finally, create a summary of your findings from the Affinity Diagram session.
Break up your synthesis into three key components:
- Key insights: Trending takeaways from the user research
- Key quotes: Specific quotes from user interviews (if applicable) that contextualize trending key insights
- Top findings: The most interesting, relevant, actionable and/or impactful things you’ve learned
