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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.

1 hour

For broad approaches

For lean approaches

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.
1. If you’re analysing data, have the researchers write it up. These could be quotes, documented facts, interview stories, drawings, or observations.
2. If you’re doing a brainstorm, use the ideas that you’ve come up with during this or previous sessions.

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.

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.

Each person can do grouping (step 6) individually so that everyone gets the opportunity to share their views without being influenced by others.
It’s ok to rearrange the groups if it doesn’t make sense to you. You can discuss this as a team after grouping.
Each idea or insight (post-it) should be a phrase or sentence that is understable to people who aren’t across the project.
If it makes sense, draw lines between individual notes or groups to show that they’re connected.
If you’re facilitating, make sure you’re being patient, using customer empathy, effective listening skills and people management skills.