Analyze Data and Find Insights...
...by using storytelling and visual diagramming
The Affinity Diagram helps the team analyze the data gathered from interviews. By using a storytelling approach, team members who haven’t been to the interviews get a better understanding of each user’s pain points, motivations and needs.
GOAL
Make sense of the data in the form of stories and visual connections
PARTICIPANTS
Designers, Business Leads
TIME NEEDED
45 - 90 minutes
PHASE
Discover
Before You Start
- Conduct user interviews
- The Affinity Diagramming method is recommended for analyzing interviews. You can prepare and conduct user interviews with the following method:
Materials you will need
If you are running a physical workshop, you need post-its and whiteboards or brownpaper. Affinity diagrams from interview results tend to grow large, so make sure you have sufficient whiteboard space available.
Templates for Virtual Collaboration
Steps
Affinity diagramming includes several steps. We recommend completing them in one session.
Retell the interview
The notetaker of each interview retells the interview. While the notetaker is telling the story, the other participants note down the findings on post-its.
Sort by similarity
Once the storytelling ends, copy the interview findings from each of the interviewees and start sorting them by similarity.
Describe each cluster in detail
Give each a name and summary that describe the key insight and what you learned about the challenge in this cluster.
Review the clusters
Once you have all the clusters, review them and see if the cluster names are specific and actionable enough. Adjust them accordingly.
Prioritize the clusters
You can prioritize the clusters by voting on them as a group or by using the Value Heatmap method.
This board will potentially grow large. Adjust the lines and sizes of the board as needed.
Make sure the clusters are named as early as possible. The names and the content can always be changed. Avoid clusters with more than seven insights. You can layer the same information on top of each other to help declutter. Don’t delete same or similar information mentioned from different interviews, as you want to see if several interviewees had the same or similar insights.
You're done!
The team now hopefully has a good understanding of each user’s pain points, motivations and needs. This may be used as input for creating the Persona(s).