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Affinity diagrams 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.

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.

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

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.

Best Practice

1. Put pieces of data, small documented facts, drawings, ideas, and observations onto post-it notes, cards, or pieces of paper and put them up on wall charts, white boards or chalk boards. This is where the associated imagery of walls filled with post-it notes comes from. The sticky notes allow the design team to easily stick up and move pieces of data around in order to create clusters of similar themes, groups and patterns.

2. Take one post-it and make it the first post-it in the first group.

3. Take the next post-it and ask, "Is this similar to the first one or is it different?". Then, you will place it in the first group or into its own group.

4. You continue post-it by post-it as you place similar ideas together and create new groups when ideas do not fit into an existing cluster.

5. You should now have 3-10 groups, so it's time to talk about the best elements of those clusters.

6. Name the clusters to help you create an information structure and discover themes.

7. Rank the most important clusters over less important clusters. Be aware which values, motives, and priorities you use as foundation ideas before you start ranking: Is this your user's priorities, your company's, the market's, the stakeholder's, or your own? Which ones should you put most emphasis on?

8. Sometimes it make sense to create connections with other clusters using lines or other devices between individual bits of data or clusters of data.

9. Describe what you have synthesised, for example, insights, user needs, pain points, or look for gaps you haven't addressed yet.

10. Focus on translating what you've organised and understood into practice, rather than just identifying similar ideas.

You can download and print the Affinity Diagram (i.e. Space Saturate and Group) template which you and your team can use as a guide.

Author/Copyright holder: Open.Michigan. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Affinity Diagrams can help you go from complete chaos and no overview of your information to creating groups of information, which you have named and organised into hierarchies that make sense.

The Take Away

Affinity Diagrams can help you bundle and cluster large bodies of information, facts, ethnographic research, ideas from brainstorms, user opinions, user needs, insights, design issues, etc. This method will help you name, rank and understand relations between groups of information. For this reason, this method is also known as "Space Saturate and Group" by d.school. This is a great method which can, if you follow the step-by-step process which we've described, surprisingly and straightforwardly create an overview and synthesise your findings. It's important that you remember to sum up the major insights, user needs, pain points, gaps, etc. Once you've done that you can focus on translating what you've organised and understood and put it into practice.

Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

References & Where to Learn More

IDEO.org, Bundle Ideas:
http://www.designkit.org/methods/30

Chris Gielow, Affinity Mapping Timelapse: This video by Chris Gielow gives a good sense of how the process plays itself out:
https://vimeo.com/47189546

AFFINITY CLUSTERING, The Catalyst Program provides the following Affinity Clustering Video Guide which gives a good overview:
http://www.wearecatalysts.org/toolkit/5

Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: star5112. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

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Affinity Diagrams - Learn How to Cluster and Bundle Ideas and Facts

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Affinity diagrams 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.

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What is the KJ Technique?

The KJ-Method or KJ Technique, is an idea generating and prioritizing technique named after its inventor, Jiro Kawakita. This technique is one of the most popular brainstorming variations for design, team, retrospective, and project meetings. The KJ Technique includes these steps:

1. Individual brainstorming:
Everyone silently writes down ideas. Each idea goes on a separate note.

2. Sharing ideas:
People take turns sharing the ideas they've written and posting them to the group space.

3. Grouping or Clustering:
Working together, the team makes groups of similar ideas or concepts. Each group then gets named with a single word or short phrase that best captures the core concept underlying the ideas in that group.

4. Voting
The team then votes on which concepts matter most. Each person gets a set number of votes (or "dots") that they can place on the concepts they care most about. The concepts that get the most dots win.

Learn More

Related Lucid Blog Posts

Related Templates

Related Glossary Terms

Brainstorming, Dot Voting, Silent Brainstorming, Simple Consensus Workshop

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The KJ-Method or KJ Technique, is an idea generating and prioritizing technique named after its inventor, Jiro Kawakita. This technique is one of the most popular brainstorming variations for design, team, retrospective, and project meetings. The KJ Technique includes these steps: Individual brainstorming: Everyone silently writes down ideas.

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Method: Creative Matrix Category Starters

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Method: Creative Matrix Category Starters

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These are the rows that I used for my last creative matrix. Saving these because they can be plugged into any number of creative matrixes.... More information is on:
https://www.lumaworkplace.com/methods/creative-matrix

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Process: Concept Development and Iteration

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Process: Concept Development and Iteration

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This is a document that I made while asking myself: how can I better help my team move through the concept development & iteration process without getting to stuck in any one phase?

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This video offers a nice introduction to design thinking applications in business, and explains why design thinking is increasingly relevant in today's business world.

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Design thinking is prominent in business... why not in ID?

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While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

Though ostensibly geared to understanding and molding the experiences of customers, design thinking also profoundly reshapes the experiences of the innovators themselves. For example, immersive customer research helps them set aside their own views and recognize needs customers haven't expressed. Carefully planned dialogues help teams build on their diverse ideas, not just negotiate compromises when differences arise. And experiments with new solutions reduce all stakeholders' fear of change.

At every phase-customer discovery, idea generation, and testing-a clear structure makes people more comfortable trying new things, and processes increase collaboration. Because it combines practical tools and human insight, design thinking is a social technology -one that the author predicts will have an impact as large as an earlier social technology: total quality management.

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While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

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Let me just get this off my chest--instructional design sometimes feels too academic, too stodgy. Sometimes it feels like the entire profession is stuck back in the 1950's or 60's. Perhaps it's the way instructional design is still taught today or perhaps it's just the way it's practiced. Our systematic approach to instructional design often yields training that is too similar to the last course we produced; today's training looks remarkably similar to the training from 10 years ago.

Where's the true innovation in learning? Where's the creativity? How do we design solutions that actually engage our learners?

What will learning look like in the latter half of the 21st century or 22nd century? How do we get there from here?

I'm not saying that innovative solutions aren't out there, I'm just saying I want to find them. I want to study them. I want to build them.

I want to talk to others about instructional design challenges and opportunities with all the excitement and passion that NASA scientists must have felt when they heeded President Kennedy's challenge to land mankind on the moon. Instructional design as its taught and practiced today just doesn't do that for me. I don't want to discuss criterion-referenced testing anymore. I don't want to talk about cognitive load theory. I don't want to discuss the merits (or lack thereof) of ADDIE.

How are we going to take that leap and move our profession forward?

I'll tell you how I think it will happen. It will happen by looking outside our own profession into the disciplines and approaches used by others-keeping what's good about instructional design and integrating the good we find in other disciplines.

One such approach that every instructional designer should examine is that of design thinking. In a society that almost worships innovation, design thinking seems to be everywhere in the business world today, yet I rarely hear it discussed in the context of instructional design.

If you're not familiar with design thinking, let me introduce you. Design thinking is a way of solving tough challenges in a creative and collaborative manner. It takes a human-centered approach, meaning that the end-user (in our case, the learner) is at the center of focus. It is a discipline used by designers to create products and services that end-users actually want and need, products and services that solve a real problem. Design thinking is particularly useful for exploring new approaches.

So, what's so different about design thinking from instructional design?

Focus

First, I would say the primary difference is where the focus is placed. Instructional design seems to place the focus on the topic or process being taught. If we were developing training on how to repair a copy machine, we might begin with the troubleshooting and repair process itself, breaking it down into components or sub-processes. Traditional instructional design might teach us to begin with the documented procedures for repairing a copy machine.

Design thinking, on the other hand, would start with the repairman at the center of focus. A team utilizing a design thinking approach would take painstaking efforts to understand how the repairman works and how he feels. The design thinking team would try to understand why a repairman behaves the way he does. Empathy for the end-user is a hallmark of design thinking.

Collaboration

The second difference is how the instructional design team works versus the design thinking team. A single instructional designer (ID) may be tasked with writing a course on copy machine troubleshooting and repair. The ID may work with a single assigned subject-matter expert (SME) to identify course objectives and topics to be covered. The ID may then retire to her office with her interview notes and stacks of copy machine documentation to write the course. The ID selects learning activities and interactions that she feels will be most effective.

Design thinking is collaborative. A team of design thinkers is deployed to interview, shadow, or otherwise question repairmen on the troubleshooting process. After the team gathers and analyzes the data collected, the team meets to ideate (or brainstorm) different solutions. Radical and far out ideas are encouraged. A particular idea is decided upon and the team begins prototyping a solution. The prototype is then tested with learners. Feedback from learners then leads to additional iterations until the solution is refined and finally implemented.

It is this collaborative approach to design that we as a profession should adopt. We should ideate more often and encourage radical solutions. We should make ideation, prototyping, and iteration a common approach if we're not doing so already.

User Experience

A third difference between instructional design and design thinking, is that instructional design often seems to focus on just the instructional material being developed (e.g., job aid, eLearning module, ILT course), not all the intricate details on how it is implemented. Design thinking looks at the entire end-user experience. A design thinking team might consider:

How the learner hears about the course

How the learner determines whether he or she would benefit from the course

How the learner enrolls in the course

How the learner finds out about any pre-requisites or preparation for the course

How the learner accesses the course

How the learner navigates through the course

How the learner provides feedback on course

What follow-up communication happens after the course

What other resources are provided and how they are accessed

How the impact of the training is measured

What mechanisms are in place for the learner to discuss what was learned with peers

These considerations all contribute to the learner experience (LX). The term learner experience design (LX Design) has become popular and refers to the totality of the learner's experience, from start to finish; design thinking encompasses these same aspects.

Conclusion

Incorporating design thinking mindsets and methods into our instructional design processes may yield the innovation and engagement we are seeking. As a side benefit, it may also infuse creativity, fun, and joy into the instructional design process.

I'm hoping that others are also beginning to take a design thinking approach to their learning challenges. If so, I want to hear from you. What successes (or failures) have you had?

If you've heard of other L&D teams using design thinking methods, please share examples.

Please consider joining my newly created LinkedIn group called Design Thinking for Learning Innovation. I just created the group, so there isn't any content there yet, but I want a place where we can discuss how design thinking is being used to develop innovative learning solutions.

And finally, to learn more about design thinking check out the Stanford design school's (d.school) crash course on design thinking: https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources-collections/a-virtual-crash-course-in-design-thinking

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Design Thinking: Instructional Design Reimagined

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Let me just get this off my chest--instructional design sometimes feels too academic, too stodgy. Sometimes it feels like the entire profession is stuck back in the 1950's or 60's.