You have completed the multitude of interviews, market research, focus groups, and surveys, and now you find yourself drowning in quotes and observations, but without some structure, all you will have is a mountain of information.
What is required is a way to gather these large amounts of data (ideas, criticisms, opinions, and issues) and organize them into an actionable plan. This is where an affinity diagram can offer the practicing marketer a base-level way to organize these large groups of data into groupings based on their natural relationships. This tool is very popular for brainstorming, but can also provide value by providing the first step in making sense of the volumes of information you may have collected.
In the late 1970s, the US government commissioned an exercise to study effective group decision-making. In this exercise, they asked 30 military experts to study enemy intelligence data and to try to determine the enemy troop's movements.
Each expert analyzed the data and created a report. The commission then scored each report on the accuracy of how well each one actually predicted the troop's movements. They found that the average military expert only scored 7 out of 100 elements correctly. Each expert then reviewed all the other experts' reports and rewrote their initial assessment. The average accuracy for these revised reports went up by 72 points to a total of 79 out of a possible 100.
What was different between the first time they completed a report and the second report? The experts did not have any new information. All they had was the combined perspectives of all the other experts. When they added those additional perspectives to their own, their accuracy increased ten fold.
When designing new products, most companies' resources are limited. It becomes necessary to find some way to prioritize all the things you and your customers want you to do. The answer probably resides inside the customer VoC you have done, but how to get all these perspectives into a prioritized list is a challenge for most organizations.
To do this, we turn to a popular technique that has been around for thousands of years, which is the grouping of data based on natural relationships. This is referred to as an affinity diagram, which is also often referred to as "the KJ-method" after its inventor Jiro Kawakita.
Like the proceeding example, the affinity process is used to bring organization to the data you have collected and provides two key outcomes that are critical for VoC and the innovation process:
- Sifting through large volumes of data: Often the interviews create a large list of unsorted data as a result of documenting multiple segments and customer needs.
- Encourage new patterns of thinking: An affinity process is an excellent way to get people to react at a "gut" level instead of intellectually dissecting the customer input. This is especially true when using the tool for brainstorming as it allows the participants to input ideas without criticism, which often yields creative ideas that are outside the traditional business or marketing areas.
Affinitizing your data is a process performed by a group or team to channel the various perspectives and opinions of customers they have interviewed in an attempt to meld these insights into logical groupings. In this case, it is done by the interview teams who have just transferred their set of customer observations and quotes onto yellow sticky notes. Ideally, there should be no more than five or six participants per affinity team with a maximum of 10, so you may need to break into smaller groups initially and come back together at a later step.
At this point, you have organized all your notes, audio clips, video clips, photos, and diagrams from all the interviews you have done. You have highlighted your notes from all the interviews and prioritized the key messages from the customers. You have also transferred each of these key quotes or observations to a yellow sticky note using an agreed upon protocol and you likely have somewhere between 50–100 yellow sticky notes. You are now ready to move to the next step, where you can start driving out the key customer product attributes using an affinity diagram. This next step is a critical part of the process and can easily take a half to a full day, but can be done in much less time depending on the nature of the exercise. This is a critical step and should not be short-changed:
- Determine the focus question. Each session will have a focus question, and you can use the same data to answer different questions. Some potentials questions could include:
- What requirements do our customers have for our next-generation widget?
- What are the biggest obstacles to our product selling?
- What new service offerings do we need to provide?
You can only do one at a time, so it is best to pick the most important one first.
- Call a meeting to review everyone's customer interview observations and consolidate your sticky notes. Ensure that all the people who went on the customer visits attend the meeting and have filled out the yellow sticky notes. This is critical and there can be no exceptions. Limit the participants to only those people who have actually participated in the customer interview and a facilitator if needed. If your management insists upon attending the meeting but have not actually done the customer interviews, they must participate as observers only. They have not done the interviews so any input they have would more than likely be based on their own bias.
- Make sure that you have ample space for the teams to work together on the affinity process. It is recommended that you bring a number of flip charts and a roll of paper, if available, to construct your affinity diagram. If you have a roll of paper, cut two pieces of 5 to 6 feet and tape them to one or two walls to construct your "board."
- Assign one person who may have done previous exercises with affinity diagrams to the facilitator role.
- One at a time, have each person read their observation, quote, or image from their sticky note and have them place it on the board. Others cannot debate or question the contents of the sticky note, but can ask for clarification if it is needed.
- Once all the sticky notes have been placed on the board, have everyone go up to the board to review all the observations and quotes.
- Have everyone look for any sticky notes that are duplicates, and in silence have each team member place the duplicates on top of each other so the original observation or quote still shows. The duplicates do not have to say the exact same thing, but should have the exact same meaning. Once all the duplicates have been found, allow everyone to talk to make sure everyone is in agreement that the duplicates are indeed duplicates, and if not, separate them again. Have the team pick the best statement that represents this observation or need and place it on the top (see Figure 7.5):
Figure 7.5
When you have finished, you could easily have 200 or more sticky notes on the board. The goal now is to determine the most critical 20–50 statements that best answer the original focus question. To do this we will have to narrow down the large number. When this is complete, we expect to have closer to 20–30. The next steps will help us narrow down the extensive number of notes to something much more manageable.
- Taking turns, have everyone move, one at a time, the sticky notes they consider the most important to another section of the board or to another board on another wall. Have the participants group the sticky notes roughly into the topic categories from the discussion topics we used in the discussion guide (and are at the top left of the sticky note if you followed the protocol we described earlier) as they move them to the new board. During this process the participants will notice yellow sticky notes that are trivial or irrelevant and these should not be moved to the new board.
- Examine and remove all yellow sticky notes that only have technical information, such as specifications, or are a description of a new feature. The remaining sticky notes should only have customer voices that express a customer need or desired outcome. Do not discard the yellow sticky notes that had specifications or features, but put them aside for future use.
If you still have in excess of 30 sticky notes at this time, you will need a way to systematically reduce the number using a group prioritization technique:
- Have each member of the team place a red dot on the items they feel are more important. If a red dot is already on the card you would have picked, choose another card that does not yet have a red dot that is also important in your mind. Continue doing this until all the important cards are marked. Remove the unimportant ones to be used later for reference.
- If you still have in excess of 30 cards, divide 30 by the number of members of your team and round it up. This is the number of picks each person will have. If your team has 7 people, 30/7=4.3. In this case each person gets 4 picks from the board, which would result in 28 voices. Again, keep in mind your goal is to walk away with 20-30 picks for the entire team.
- One at a time, have each person go to the board and pick what they consider to be the most important voice on the board. Have them repeat this process until voices are picked or excluded because no one feels they are important enough.
- Have each team member place their saved yellow sticky notes on a new board one at a time and read the statement aloud and explain why they picked this yellow sticky as one of the key voices.