Shelley Wood , InContext Enterprises
Affinity diagramming is fairly well known in the CHI community and used as a technique for organizing large amounts of information, especially qualitative data. However, the full potential of affinity diagramming—both as a technique for revealing design implications and as a powerful communication tool—is not being fully exploited.
Many people are building affinities through deductive reasoning—starting with an explicit or implicit set of categories and then slotting notes into the known categories. Building an affinity like this may organize the data, but doesn’t tell you very much new about your customers, and also buries new insights or important distinctions in their work. Much more valuable affinities are instead built through a true bottoms-up method, driven by a process of inductive reasoning with the data suggesting the labels for the groups rather than predefined categories. This process exposes and makes concrete common issues, distinctions, work patterns, and needs without losing individual variation.
Organizations also run into logistical and team management problems during affinity building. Because they don’t have an explicit process to follow, with guidelines for what works and what doesn’t work for managing the process and the people involved, teams get overwhelmed and discouraged.
This course teaches how to build more powerful affinities, offers a process for managing organizational issues, and provides a mechanism for using the affinity as a communication tool across the organization.
This course is based on material previously presented in InContext’s Understanding Your Customer and Rapid Contextual Design workshops, which have been taught in public and on-site classes. A highly rated version of this course was taught at CHI 2007; a shorter version was taught at CHI 2006. It was also taught at UPA 2006.
Attendees in the course will:
No specific background is required. It is appropriate for all roles.
Lecture, group discussion, exercises
Shelley Wood has more than 15 years of experience in the high technology industry. She provides side-by-side coaching and training for teams as they use Contextual Design. Shelley is a co-author of the book Rapid Contextual Design: A How-To Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design.
Website for more information about the instructor: www.incontextdesign.com