How clustering techniques affect your Ideation — Affinity Diagram
By: Mostafa Metwally
Tags: User Research, Affinity Diagrams, Design Thinking, User Experience, User Centered Design

We all know about Netflix, the worlds largest on-demand internet streaming media and online DVD movie rental service provider.

Founded August 29, 1997 in Los Gatos, California by Marc and Reed

It has 69 million members in over 60 countries enjoying more than 100 million hours of TV shows and movies per day.

Most success with : House of Cards show

Netflix — A view of recommendations

Netflix puts it as: “The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) Prizes. Winning the Netflix Prize improves our ability to connect people to the movies they love.” –NetflixPrize

So what do they want? Improvement to their existing system for which they were paying $1 million.

We got the background and now let’s move on to view the objective and the datasets.

Objective: “Which movie will you like” given that you have seen ‘The Dark knight, Batman Begins, Pineapple express’?

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

The idea of Clustering is to group the items together based on their attributes. The data is typically unlabeled and the similarity is measured using the distance between the two points. Example: Consider going to a Board Game shop and putting together the games from a pile of game box that are similar.

So what is affinity diagram?

An Affinity Diagram is a tool that gathers large amounts of language data (ideas, opinions, issues) and organizes them into groupings based on their natural relationships . The Affinity process is often used to group ideas generated by Brainstorming.

Affinity diagram are a great method to help you make sense of all your information when you have a lot of mixed data, such as facts, ethnographic research, ideas from brainstorms, user opinions, user needs, insights, and design issues. Affinity diagrams or clustering exercises are all about bundling and grouping information, and this method can be one of the most valuable methods to employ. For this reason, it is used in many phases of Design Thinking, as well as outside of the design context.

Author/Copyright holder: Josh Evnin. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Why?

The Affinity Diagram is a method which can help you gather large amounts of data and organise them into groups or themes based on their relationships. The affinity process is great for grouping data gathered during research or ideas generated during Brainstorms.

The method is also called “Space Saturate and Group”. The term “saturate” relates to the method in which everyone covers or saturates the “space” with images and notes, in order to create a wall of information, to inform, and start “grouping” the following problem-defining process. You then draw connections between these individual elements to join the dots and develop new and deeper insights. They will help define the problem(s) and develop potential ideas for solutions. In other words, you go from analysis to synthesis.

Seeing the data coming to life and moving data on post-its around on the wall helps the design team to immerse themselves in not only their own findings from field work and research, but sharing and communicating the findings with other team members in order to get a broader scope of the problem space being investigated.

According to NNGROUP: Affinity diagramming is also known as affinity mapping, collaborative sorting, snowballing, or even card sorting. (However, in UX, ‘card sorting’ stands for a very specific research method for determining the IA of a site or application. In it, users sort index cards with category names and commands written on them.)

Affinity Diagramming in UX

While affinity diagramming as a method can be used by individuals as well as groups, in UX, it is used primarily by teams for quickly organizing:

observations or ideas from a research study ideas that surface in design-ideation meetings ideas about UX strategy and vision

Affinity diagramming in UX usually involves two steps:

A. Generating the sticky notes. In this step, team members write down ideas or facts on separate sticky notes.

During a usability session, the facilitator and the observers write observations, findings, or ideas — each on one sticky note.

During an ideation workshop, attendees or the workshop facilitator write each idea on a sticky note.

B. Organizing the notes in groups. After the test or the ideation session, the team has a workshop devoted to analyzing the notes by:

sorting them into categories prioritizing each note, and determining the next steps in design or further research

Document the takeaways from this exercise

Now have a look at the clusters, the importance of each one, and the themes, then you will be able to pull some takeaways that will help you with your goals. These can be insights, user needs, pain points, or gaps. Document anything you pull from this exercise and share it with your team. You may also want to take some photos of the board so you can refer to it if anyone has any questions on how you came to your conclusions.

Difference between idea/mind mapping and affinity diagram

A simple way to think about it is logical structure to the relationships between ideas. In an affinity diagram, ideas are logically organized based on their relationship to each other. For example, if you are working on a project for an airport, We may organize my tasks based on the things we need to construct in a sequential order for project success: runway, taxiways, tower, terminal, etc. Meanwhile, a mind map is less logically structured, where ideas are floated out there that may or may not relate to each other. It makes it easier to visualize data or discover relationships between dissimilar ideas.

Design = Visualizing a solution.

The Italian verb disegnare in 16c. developed the senses “to contrive, plot, intend,” and “to draw, paint, embroider, etc.” French took both these senses from Italian, in different forms, and passed them on to English, which uses design in all senses.

As the Etymology of the word points out, the act of designing is the act of contriving a solution and to give it a shape, a visualization. This happens in every Design disciplines, like Industrial Design, Service Design and of curse Ux Design. All areas where visualization tools are fundamental because of their communication power.

What a Mind Map is.

One of the powerful tools we have as Designers to understand, define and communicate ideas is the Mind Map, currently a broad term that identifies a visual representation of a sequence of thoughts, a concept, a system or a process.

Depending from the context and from the final goal, these kinds of visual representations can come in different versions, but at their basics, they are made of words and connecting lines: the first ones represent the objects, the second ones represent the relations between the objects.

They enable us to focus on the high-level idea without caring too much about the small details, they keep alive the creative flow with a fluid process letting the concepts emerge from it. Unlike in standardized visual representations (e.g. UML diagrams), the relations between the objects here are often generic and not codified, indeed with a simple line, we can represent a parent-child relation, a cause-effect relation or even a chronological relation.