The process consists of typing each idea on a sticky note or a piece of paper. All the ideas will be randomly situated on a board or table. This board will be visible by the whole team, so everybody can participate and improve the organization during the following steps.
We will describe a step-by-step guide to create an Affinity Diagram. You can follow these steps or adapt it to your needs. Understanding the general purpose will be enough to create your own version and get good results:
- Brainstorming: The first step is to get the ideas that we will later classify into groups. Let the participants say anything or everything for a particular topic or task; any idea is welcomed at this time. You should provide them with some sticky notes or pieces of paper. Sticky notes will be especially useful in the next steps, and this is the reason why the Affinity Diagram is usually represented with a dashboard full of sticky notes:
The objective of this method is to know more about how our users think and how they relate ideas into a field, so you should avoid taking part while the participants do this step.
If participants get stuck or stop working, we can try to guide them, but remember that it is important that they create as many ideas as possible. Any personal contribution we may have can have an impact on the results. So, limit yourself to reminding the participants of the objective of the process and try to set them in motion again.
This is a fun activity, and usually, the participants start feeling comfortable after a few minutes. As soon as the participants start creating ideas, you will be able to discover many new concepts and thoughts. Feel free to take notes at this stage.
- Grouping the ideas: The next step is to group all the ideas into different categories. The participants will now have time to group the ideas from the preceding step into groups. All participants should take part in this process, moving elements into groups and creating associations:
The best results are usually obtained when all the components of the study participate and when these components come from different fields with respect to the project. The experience is much more enriching and thus, more points of view are involved in the research.
If we are creating an online store, we will try to have participants who buy and sell different types of products. Choose participants who access the platform with different devices, and whose frequency of use is also varied, which will improve the spectrum of information.
An idea can go from one group to another if the new group makes a better match for that person. The participants can collaborate and give their reasons for their associations. If one idea is clearly associated with two different groups, we should create a new note so that both the groups will have the complete pack of ideas. - Creating subgroups if necessary: If we are creating a few groups with lots of ideas in each of them, it can be interesting to create subgroups in some of them. This is an optional step, and it will have sense only for some of the groups:
Allow the participants a second round with the objective of dividing the groups into smaller groups. At the end of the activity, one group can have elements inside the main group and other elements inside deeper-level groups.
For example, we can have a group of electronic devices with items such as smartphones, smartwatches, tablets, TVs, and a Chromecast. The participants may find it logical to group all the items with a screen into the same group, but may find that the Chromecast has no relation with the other items. Finally, Chromecast can sit with electronic devices and the other elements belong in the new devices with screen subgroup.
- Naming the groups and subgroups: Once we have the ideas and concepts classified in groups, we will ask the participants to choose one idea that represents all the elements inside the group. If the participants do not find one element that represents the relationship between all the elements, they can create a new one:
Move the sticky notes chosen as the group label, or the label created for this group, to the top of the groups. The participants can move elements from one group or subgroup to a new one as many times as needed.
With these groups, and a few ideas in each of them, it should be easy to see the relationships between the different groups and their elements. If we find that several groups have a relationship with each other, we can add these new relationships as a higher-level group, giving proper names to the new classifications.
In this kind of method, the objective is that the groups and categories come from the ideas, from inside to outside, trying to avoid the creation of categories based on previous thoughts.
Even if the ideas obtained are not directly applicable to your design solution, learning how your users organize them in their heads will provide valuable insight into how they think:
