How to Get Started with Affinity Diagrams

The affinity diagramming process  involves a number of components, the most basic of which is the set of affinity notes. These are the original user observations, and I  say "original" but not literally; they actually are taken from user observations, but they're written in the first person, which we call "voice   of the customer," and they're always in the first  person and always in the voice of the customer.

And of course, people don't normally always talk  like that, so you'll find yourself having to,  transcribe them, either in the field or, if  you've taken recordings, you might transcribe   them later. It's always a lot of people,  it's tiring, you know, it's so even that gets   exhausting. So I try to keep it like one hour max,  one and a half, like a bigger shopping. We try   to avoid that. We try to avoid days that we know  it's gonna or hours that we know it's going to be  

like really packed. When I did take interview  notes in the field, I did it on a small laptop,   and I would deliberately write these in the  appropriate format, so they would be in the first-person voice of the customer, and if I thought there was any chance that the interviewee might have meant something different, I'd read  it out to them, and I'd say, "Is that a fair representation of what you've just said?" And they  would usually agree. Occasionally, they'd say,  

"Well, no, it was more like something else."  So, it's good to make sure that you actually check this data with your original interviewees.  For the remote sessions, I did recordings and had that transcribed into text and then turned that  into voice of the customer and then sent those files back to the interviewees just to ask them to have a run through and make sure that everything there was what they'd said, and they were happy with it. So, that just makes sure that we're  still on the same page in terms of what user said and what we actually, wrote down.

The affinity diagramming process starts with the basic affinity notes that we obtain from user interviews and adds multiple layers of hierarchy effectively. Karen Holtzblatt suggests three. So, you and your colleagues go through all the observations, all the affinity notes, group things that you think are related for whatever reason together, and then you would put a blue note on top of those to indicate that those are connected

and try to describe, again in the voice of the customer, what that affinity is, why those particular things are similar. On top of that, you might repeat the process with pink, and those, not surprisingly, group together the blue themes. And then finally, on top, you have a green layer. Now, the green layer may or may not be in the voice of the customer; by that stage, you're actually quite happy just to summarize. But at the pink and blue layers,

if you have both of those, it's not absolutely essential, it's important that you don't misrepresent the notes underneath. So, summarizing is generally not a good idea at the lower levels. We actually need to be, much more detailed in describing the notes underneath, as it were. If you're doing an affinity diagramming activity face to face, you'll be doing it in a large room, large enough to accommodate all the team members for the process. And those team members there,

beyond your original project team, might include other stakeholders or managers in the organization, might include people from your marketing department, for example, but the people who can contribute and who are interested in what your users say and do and to help shape the direction that your product or service is going to take. So, you have this, this in theory, large room with a fairly large number of people in it, and you need to distribute now these observation notes that you took from your research and turn them into affinity notes

by making them first person, and you shuffle those. It's important that you shuffle them because otherwise you could end up giving handfuls of the same participants to a very small number of people. People are asked to put the affinity notes either down on the table if you're doing it horizontally and they're just plain notes or up on the walls if you're using post-it notes or something similar. And then you start to organize them and reorganize them and label them.

Now, the curious thing is the choice of colors. It turns out that you can buy packs of post-it notes from various manufacturers in these four colors: the yellow affinity notes and then pink, blue, and green. So, that's handy. I don't know whether that was behind Karen's original choice of colors for these things, but it's extremely convenient. You may end up doing this incrementally, so you might actually have several sessions. You would do that with new data when it arrives, and this is actually a recommended procedure, especially

in new problem areas where you're not entirely sure what you're going to find out, but you might still have a lot of data. So, you have an initial session and then you add to it in a subsequent session. Obviously, it's quite a different process for doing it online, but this is the summary of how you do it when you're in a physical face-to-face situation.