How we used affinity mapping

Mon Apr 25 2022

For our project on sharing of menstrual products and knowledge, we used affinity mapping in two contexts:

We interviewed a group of women about their experiences around the menstruation. After combining our interview notes, we created sticky notes containing single units of info that we then classified with affinity mapping.
We used lateral-divergent techniques to create ideas that we used affinity mapping to refine.

Interviews to sticky notes

As part of our interviews, we asked participants questions in three categories:

their first experience with menstruation
their routine experience
their practices and opinions on sharing

We considered each category as a whole instead of recording each question separately. We were then able to reanalyze the answers to create individual points, which we represented as sticky notes in Miro. We tagged the sticky notes with profiles of the participants they came from. We later added data from conversations with relevant institutions.

These sticky notes would be moved, copied, sorted and edited through many exercises.

Classification: Affinity mapping for analysis

Around 200 sticky notes of 3 different colors in titled clusters and lines connecting some clusters. — The colors of the notes represents which stage they are from. There are a few uncategorized notes to the left hand side.

Classification allowed us to view points by what they actually relate to, instead of based on when the participant mentioned them. It was a mostly uncoordinated process of spotting patterns and refining. We grouped notes together first, and labeled the groups afterwards. There was overlap between the stages however, and the board was always open to changes.

Affinity mapping of ideas

We used Brainwriting and "Yes, And" to generate a large number of ideas. I want to discuss how we applied these techniques in another post. What matters for now is that we had yet another batch of sticky notes.

Sticky notes in a neat grid — 104 sticky notes from an ideation session.

We used the affinity mapping technique again to sort these ideas. One change is that we wrote down three large headings beforehand. These reflected general directions that had been floating around in the group before the ideation phase.

The sticky notes from before with three headings above — The board before we started creating clusters. The three headings: Application, Vending Machine and Collection Box.

As we were sorting the ideas same as before, we noticed several that fit under more than one heading. We simply duplicated these.

The sticky notes sotted across the headings and into sub-clusters — The current state of the ideas frame. We resized the sticky notes that had more text, for ease of reading.

What now?

Using affinity mapping on interview data helped us get a bird's eye view on each topic we had set out to learn about. It made the interview data much more accessible and easier to draw conclusions from, as opposed to the wall of text it was before.

The whole spreadsheet, 3898 words unreadably zoomed out to fit on screen. — The whole 3898 words of interview data in a spreadsheet before sticky notes and affinity mapping.

Aside from being an opportunity for introspection, affinity mapping on our idea notes could be useful for future activities like SCAMPER and dot voting. I will reflect on this in an upcoming post.