Contextual Design, 2nd Edition

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The Affinity Diagram

Abstract

Any type of ethnographic or qualitative data is hard to organize. It’s complex and unstructured. The easiest methods of organizing the data, some sort of classification, tends to work against innovation—if you organize data into a classification you already know, how do you get new insight? The Affinity Diagram is an inductive process that bubbles structure up out of the details of the user data. It creates a single view of the market out of hundreds of individual data notes. Building it acts as another immersion activity, as the whole team comes together to organize the data. This chapter describes what an Affinity is and how to build one that will drive design insight. It also introduces communication design ...