UX Affinity Diagrams help simplify user experience design. These diagrams can facilitate the categorization and synthesis of complex user research data and inform a customer journey map when the notes describe a user's experience over time. On the Boardmix online whiteboard, the team can keep individual notes, group labels, and questions together while reviewing the material.
1. What is a UX affinity diagram?
UX Affinity Diagrams, also known as KJ Diagrams, are a brainstorming and organization technique used in User Experience (UX) design. They provide a structured approach to organizing and analyzing ideas. By grouping related concepts, designers can identify patterns, themes, and relationships between different elements within a design, making it easier to refine the user experience. This method also allows designers to involve stakeholders in the ideation process. The ASQ affinity-diagram method groups ideas by their natural relationships before naming the groups.
Affinity Diagrams streamline the design process by assisting in idea categorization. Ideas from brainstorming sessions are usually disjointed and scattered. The use of these diagrams helps categorize these ideas into different groups based on their relation and relevance. This can support UX competitive analysis and enables designers to focus on individual elements without losing sight of the bigger picture. Keep competitor observations distinguishable from findings about your own users.
2. How UX affinity diagrams simplify user experience design
In a field that often deals with extensive user research, affinity diagrams serve as an organizing tool to streamline complex information. Designers often grapple with vast amounts of disjointed issues and data, ranging from user interviews and observations to survey results and usability testing feedback. Affinity Diagrams are used to organize this scattered data into coherent clusters based on relationships or common themes.
This systematic classification enables designers to visualize connections between different data and issues, helping them examine user behavior, needs, and motivations. Insights drawn from these relationships can guide the development of user personas and inform design decision-making, but the source notes must support the interpretation. The visual structure allows designers to easily update and rearrange information as new data comes in or when different design issues arise. This flexibility is useful as the research progresses.
Keep a source reference on each research note, such as a participant ID and interview timestamp. Separate what the participant said or did from the team's interpretation. If two participants report the same difficulty, keep both source references rather than deleting one as a duplicate: repeated evidence is different from an accidentally copied note. Group size alone does not establish how common a problem is across the whole user population.
3. Examples: Grouping ideas in EdTech and the movie industry
EdTech industry
The EdTech board above groups brainstormed topics such as online learning, virtual tutoring, interactive learning, and AI in education. Its groups include technologies in education, learning methodologies, and an industry overview. It illustrates how a broad collection of ideas can become a set of related topics.
For a UX study of an online learning platform, add actual learner observations to a separate area before drawing conclusions. For example, if interview notes describe difficulty finding tutor availability, group those notes by the difficulty they describe—not simply under a preferred solution such as “AI education.” Link each observation to its source and use the group to frame a question about the booking experience. The brainstorm gives the team areas to explore; it does not show that a platform redesign improved engagement.
Movie industry
Open the full-size movie-industry brainstorm
The movie board organizes topics such as cinematography, art direction, visual effects, casting, sound design, and documentary film. These are brainstorming topics grouped into film production, an industry overview, and specialized areas. A team can use the shared view to discuss relationships and choose a narrower subject to explore.
If the task is instead to improve a streaming service, build the groups from viewer observations rather than treating these production topics as user feedback. Notes about choosing a film, understanding a subscription, and recovering from interrupted playback may belong in different groups, depending on what the research actually contains. Keep the original wording visible so the group label does not turn a specific observation into a broader claim.
4. Step-by-step guide: Creating a UX affinity diagram with Boardmix
A UX affinity diagram can be a useful part of user experience design. It is a tool that organizes user research data into a digestible format. Boardmix provides a shared canvas for creating such diagrams. Here's a step-by-step guide using notes and manual grouping.
Create notes for each piece of information
On Boardmix, each piece of your data will be represented by a note. Make sure each note contains a concise summary of a specific observation or idea from your research, with a source reference. Use separate areas for observed evidence, interpretations, and proposed solutions so they are not confused during discussion.
Organize notes into groups and name each group
The core of creating an affinity diagram involves organizing the notes into meaningful groups. Start by moving similar notes close to each other. As patterns emerge, group related notes together. Leave an unrelated note on its own until a useful connection emerges instead of forcing it into the nearest group.
Once you have created groups, name each group in a way that captures the essence of the data it contains. This will serve as the theme for that group and help users understand what kind of insights the group holds. For research notes, a specific label such as “Cannot tell which tutor slots are available” is more useful than a broad label such as “Booking.”
When sharing the board, open Share, choose the intended access permissions, and use Copy to copy the link, as shown below. Check who can view or edit before sending a board containing research material; remove personal information that recipients do not need.
Review and refine your affinity diagram
After all groups are named, take some time to review and refine your diagram. This may involve reorganizing some notes, regrouping them, or renaming the groups for clarity. Ask teammates to check whether each label fits the notes beneath it. Keep conflicting observations visible rather than removing them to make a theme look consistent.
5. From grouped notes to a UX question
Return to the EdTech example: a cluster of observations about tutor availability could lead to a question about how learners find a bookable slot. Before proposing a change, inspect the source notes for the exact point of difficulty. If the board contains only topic ideas, decide what you need to learn from users first. A named group is a useful starting point for discussion, not a finding by itself.
Open the full-size Boardmix template view
Explore the Affinity Diagram Template
