Affinity Diagram

An Affinity Diagram is a tool used to organize ideas, themes, or data into logical groups based on their relationships. It is commonly used in brainstorming sessions, where participants write ideas on sticky notes and then group them based on similarity. Affinity diagrams help identify patterns, insights, and solutions, making them useful for user research synthesis or problem-solving.

After user interviews, you'll have a flood of observations that feel overwhelming. Affinity diagrams help your team make sense of it all by clustering related insights together — surfacing patterns you wouldn't spot by reading notes linearly. This is the step that turns raw research into actionable product decisions.

A team building a project management tool runs 10 user interviews and uses an affinity diagram to discover that 7 out of 10 users mentioned struggling with notification overload — a clear signal to prioritize notification settings in the next sprint.