Affinity Mapping

Purpose
- To help analyse your research when you have a lot of mixed data, such as user insights, brainstorm ideas, design issues, and ethnographic research.
- To help you define the problem and develop solutions.
When To Run This
- After you’ve finished conducting research.
- During Rapid Ideation — you can use it to group similar ideas.
Time
1 hour
Input
- Previous research
- Or insights written on individual post-it notes
- Or ideas on post-it notes
Materials
For broad approaches
- A cross-disciplinary team of people, of differing seniority
For lean approaches
- one person who’s fully across the project
- Large Whiteboard
- Or wall space
- Post-it notes (yellow + blue)
- Markers
- Sticky dots
TheSteps
Prepare:Prepare:
Choose your team (or person, if taking a lean approach). Your team should be across the project and be from different disciplines, genders, ages and status. Keep it to 6 people or less and include both external and internal stakeholders if you can.
Pick a facilitator to lead the discussion, provide background information, and take photos of the map as you work. For the lean approach, the organiser (you) can facilitate.
Find a large wall space or table in an area with few distractions to set out your affinity map.
Gather your insights or ideas, and write them on yellow post-it notes.
- If you’re analysing data, have the researchers write it up. These could be quotes, documented facts, interview stories, drawings, or observations.
- If you’re doing a brainstorm, use the ideas that you’ve come up with during this or previous sessions.
Action It:Action It:
Spread out your insights (yellow post-it notes) on your wall space in any order.
Group the similar or relevant ones into top level categories as a team. Discuss these and move the groupings into a hierarchy of importance, and then create sub-categories.
Name the groups. Use a blue post-it note to label each group with a theme that best describes it. List each group of notes vertically under their new name.
Review the naming and groups as a team to make sure that they’re labeled and placed properly.
Make insight statements. Take the names of the groups and come up with a sentence that summarises the insight.
Prioritise them by giving each person 3 dots to vote on which insights or themes they think are the most important based on the goals of the project.
Next Steps:Next Steps:
Define your focus area. You can use your results as a starting point for your How Might We Statements or, if you were grouping ideas, the Impact/Effort Matrix can help you decide on which ones you want to focus on.