Affinity Mapping with Stormboard
What is Affinity Mapping?
Affinity Mapping is an organizational method that teams use when they have a large amount of data or information and need to narrow it down into smaller groupings. This method works for almost any topic or situation, and can be useful for any type of team, but is most often used by project management and product-focused teams.
It is common for teams who practice Affinity Mapping to use a wall, board, or large surface with sticky notes and/or markers to organize their data.
“The Affinity Diagram is a method which can help you gather large amounts of data and organize 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.” (source)
Basically, Affinity Mapping is a big brainstorming session where ideas are organized into specific categories so that your team can get a better sense of what they are working on.
How to conduct an Affinity Mapping session
In most instances, Affinity Mapping is done using the Space Saturation and Group method. This format is the simplest way to practice Affinity Mapping.
Space Saturation
This involves teams working together to put all of their ideas down onto a board, wall, map, etc. The goal is to saturate the area with as many ideas as possible. These can be in the form of sticky notes, images, drawings, and so on, and can include anything that a team thinks of, such as research, statistics, pain points, data, random ideas, or feedback.
Once this is done and there is plenty of information ready to go, it’s time to group!
Grouping
Just as the name suggests, Grouping involves taking the information that was generated in your brainstorm and moving it into smaller groups or sections.
Affinity Mapping groups are created by putting similar ideas together. If one idea is related to another, those will go in the same group, and so on. Keep making new groups if need be — there’s no set number of groups, but don’t create too many as this will be difficult to keep track of.
When the groups are done being formed, the next step is to look for solutions to problems, answers to questions, insights, new ideas, and so forth. Teams can give each grouping a name/title, and then start to see if any themes have emerged. Then, they need to decide which they want to set as priorities.
How to end an Affinity Mapping session
After an Affinity Mapping session is complete, the goal is to take the results of the meeting and put them into practice going forward.
“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 organized and understood and put it into practice.” (source)
Affinity Mapping with Stormboard
Using sticky notes is a huge part of Affinity Mapping — which is why Stormboard is a great digital alternative. Our software gives you a digital workspace where you can create an infinite digital whiteboard that uses virtual sticky notes, so there’s no wasting paper and cleaning up after a brainstorming session is complete!
You can add an infinite number of sticky notes to your Storm (what we call your digital workspace or whiteboard), and they can be easily moved and grouped however you want them to be.
Your team can use our blank template or general template sections to browse through templates that allow flexibility and space to let ideas move around where you want them to. Those with a Business or Enterprise Subscription can create their own custom templates, but if you are on a Personal or Startup Plan, feel free to contact us for more information on customization!
When affinity mapping is done with physical sticky notes, it’s hard for ideas to be saved, so people often take photos of their progress that end up getting lost or deleted or are too blurry to read.
With Stormboard, everything is automatically saved to the cloud. There is no need to click ‘save’ because all of your progress will be there just as you left it. If any changes are made by a team member while you aren’t in the Storm, you will be notified in your activity tab.
We also offer a reporting feature! This converts and saves all of your information into a format of your choice, such as a Microsoft Word Doc, PowerPoint presentation, or a screenshot.
If you want to advance your grouping, try using index cards. Instead of a sticky note, you can create index cards in any Storm that allow you to write jot-note lists, and even link to separate Substorms if you need more organization.
Read more about Substorms in our help doc: https://help.stormboard.com/stormboard-advanced-topics/what-is-a-substorm
Get Started
Physical Affinity Mapping can be time-consuming and can become overwhelming if you run out of space or sticky notes, which is why a digital approach is much more efficient and effective.
Sign up for a 30-day FREE trial to try Affinity Mapping with Stormboard today!
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