Article

Affinity Diagramming: Collaboratively Sort UX Findings and Design Ideas

Rachel Krause and Kara Pernice · Nielsen Norman Group Free Intermediate

Affinity diagramming is the literal, hands on version of sorting your transcripts by who the person is and how badly they hurt: you write one note per finding, cluster similar ones, and the clusters that end up biggest and tightest are your real pattern. This article gives you the step by step process so the sorting your short answer describes is not just a mental exercise. Good to run as an actual session with a co-founder rather than doing it alone in your head.

• Write one discrete observation per note, not a whole interview summary per note.
• Group notes by similarity first, then name the cluster, not the other way around.
• The tightest, most repeated cluster is more valuable than the biggest, vaguest one.