Affinity mapping can be useful as a group activity or individually as it helps organize ideas and data. The technique can help discover embedded patterns of thinking by sorting and clustering language-based information into relationships.

Affinity mapping is well suited to teamwork as it is interactive, and many people can participate at once. Also, more people means more perspectives; the diversity of knowledge and backgrounds a group brings can yield more creative insights or better ideation.

Use this tool when you want to find categories and meta-categories within a cluster of ideas or when you want to see which ideas are most common within a group.

Affinity Mapping has three basic steps; you can tweak each one to fit your own style, but the skeleton looks like this –

1. Write down every data point or idea on a separate sticky note and stick it on a wall. Every comment or quotation from each interviewee is a potential data point. Just like a brainstorm, the goal is to get a bunch of sticky notes on the wall. Note, however, that the more notes that end up on the wall, the longer it’ll take you to sort them in the next step.

2. One by one, pick up sticky notes and group related notes into clusters. Read a sticky note and put it to one side where you’ll sort them. Grab another note and check if it’s related to the first. If so, put it next to it to form a cluster, if it’s not related, put it further away to start a new cluster. Feel free to write headings for each cluster on the wall or with a different color sticky note.

3. Reflect on or discuss the themes and categories you’ve created and how they affect your next steps. Drawing on the key ideas and themes, identify the most viable ideas. The goal is to use your sorted sticky note wall to answer questions and drive your thinking.

Seeing data coming to life, moving data them around and associating them to discover connections and meanings helps teams (and individuals) to immerse themselves in not only their own findings, but sharing and communicating them with other members in order to get a broader scope of the problem space being investigated.

Affinity Mapping was created by Jiro Kawakita in the 1960s. It is also referred to as the KJ Method.