Affinity mapping how to#

Affinity mapping how to#

But it begs the follow-up question of how to gather meaning from all the data.

Brainstorming works to get a high quantity of information on the table. Most of us are familiar with brainstorming-a method by which a group generates as many ideas around a topic as possible in a limited amount of time.

That is the reason as to why I enjoyed affinity mapping so much and why I found it so effective вЂ“ writing things out on sticky notes arranging them into groups re-arranging them into other groups making a new group! ThereвЂ™s a lot of chaos at first but in the end you end up with information laid out in an order that allows you to digest easily.Affinity mapping, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane. I like character authenticity being able to see your train of thought and all the crazy ideas it took you to get there. I am not one who takes pride and pleasure in having a clean, all aligned, justified word document I much rather brainstorming through drawing things out and having a bit of madness on my page. Before starting the task, I was near tears thinking about how I was going to cut a 47 minute interview into just 3 minutes of footage, but through the use of affinity mapping I was able to arrange the data into six categories and from that choose main insights. The simplicity of this method not only allowed me to successfully gather my 5 insights, but it also took away the overwhelming feeling I was struck with when I looked at my six pages of transcript. Having only just been introduced to this method, I had expectations of it being more of a hinderance rather than a helping aid when trying to organise my insights I couldnвЂ™t have been more wrong. There are six themes that can be seen here. We were advised to use affinity mapping to gather these insights from our transcripts as it was the most effective way to see everything that had been collected, organise it all, and then finalise into 5 key insights. In carrying out this method, the team at LDS.org were able to gather insights into why people visit their site, the issues that they experience, and if their reasonings for visiting align with the objectives for the LDS organisation.ДЄfter carrying out our interviews and filming them, we were then asked to create a 3 minute video entailing 5 key insights from the information gathered. Affinity mapping requires time and effort, it took the team two days to build the affinity map вЂ“ taking the 800 responses and categorising them into 11 themes. The team gathered a large amount of qualitative answers (over 800 responses!) from their online study and they then used affinity mapping to break down the answers into themes.

In October 2011, the LDS.org team randomly selected 1% of their siteвЂ™s visitors to answer a few questions in regards to: why they were visiting the site if they found the site easy to use if they were able to carry out the task they had intended to do on the site and the main challenge they found in completing that task. Affinity mapping is to be used only when a mass of data has been collected not a small amount. By organising in this way, this allows designers to clearly see what they have collected from an interview (or other form of data collecting) without feeling overwhelmed by the mass of information, and have it presented in a manner that allows them to work from with clarity and ease. вЂњAffinity diagramming is a process used to externalise and meaningfully cluster observations and insights from research, keeping design teams grounded in data as they design.вЂќ вЂ“ ДЄffinity mapping allows designers to synthesise and arrange the data they have gathered from research, by finding the similarities between them and laying them out in themes (categories).