How to Create an Affinity Diagram for UX Research

Posted on July 19, 2019November 28, 2022 by Zack Naylor

People doing an affinity diagram with sticky notes

What is an Affinity Diagram?

An affinity diagram is a tool often used to organize data and ideas. Affinity diagrams help you organize information into groups of similar items to then analyze qualitative data or observations.

Business and design teams have used affinity diagrams for a long time to organize ideas, complex information and even customer feedback into themes or groups. For UX researchers, affinity diagrams are often used for analyzing and synthesizing user research findings by patterns and themes. In this case affinity diagrams are sometimes referred to as the KJ method or an affinity map. Also in other broad application like business brainstorming or idea generation it may be called a cluster map.

User Research Tagging and Coding – Aurelius Product Updates July 2019

Posted on July 11, 2019September 19, 2019 by Zack Naylor

Tags Analyzing User Research, Aurelius Announcements, User Research Repository, Ux Research Tool

Tagging and coding user research notes and data just got easier with our latest updates in Aurelius!

We’ve been very busy learning from our customers on how to help them best tag, analyze and share their user research data and findings. In continuing with our product updates and sharing what we learn from customers and what we did about it, keep reading to hear all about our latest product updates.

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 36 with Natalie Hanson on Sharing and Communicating User Research

Posted on April 5, 2019September 19, 2019 by Zack Naylor

Tags Podcast, Research Ops, User Research

Episode 36 highlights with Natalie Hanson on Sharing and Communicating User Research:

Differences between in house and external UX teams and the unique challenges of each
Tips for collaborating with others on your user research work
How to encourage non-designers and non-researchers to collaborate on user research and insights
Tips for working with stakeholders who believe they already know what needs to be designed
Effectively communicating user research insights to inspire action from executives, developers and more

How to Organize and Share User Research Data and Insights: 3 Step Guide

Posted on March 26, 2019November 20, 2020 by Zack Naylor

Trying to organize all of your user research data and insights in one place to easily find and reuse again later? Let’s talk about how to do that.

We’ve been working on Aurelius for almost four years now and as a result we’ve spoken with a lot of teams trying to find a place to store, track and organize all the raw user research data and insights they have.

The challenge is that storing UX research often doesn’t fit neatly into places or tools we already have in place because they’re not built for that purpose. What ends up happening is that either you give up in frustration and have no real organization for your UX research, or, you try to create a UX research database with existing tools and methods.

This can have mixed results. An important factor here is having a strategy for how you’ll organize and share all of your UX research once you decide on a platform. In this article, I’ll discuss the three main steps to consider in order to most effectively store all your UX research in one central repository.

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 35 with Rob Walling on Making Tough Design and Product Choices

Posted on February 21, 2019September 19, 2019 by Zack Naylor

Tags Podcast

Episode 35 highlights with Rob Walling:

How Rob started and/or acquired multiple SaaS apps over the years and some product and design lessons he’s learned from that experience
Rob’s background as a software engineer and what made him decide to become an entrepreneur
The story of founding Drip and how Rob and how the team made some pretty big changes in the product
Finding the confidence to help you figure out how, and when, to make big product decisions
Minimum Path to Awesome and how to successfully launch new features in your product

We Extended Our Free Trials of Aurelius

Posted on February 9, 2019September 19, 2019 by Zack Naylor

Tags Aurelius Announcements

Aurelius free trials are now 30 days

We recently launched a change to our free trial model to move from 14 days to 30 days by default. This means any new customer who signs up for a free trial with Aurelius will have a full month to give Aurelius a try and share it with thier team and company.

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 34 with Jason Voiovich on Empathy and Quantitative Data in Marketing and UX

Posted on December 23, 2018September 19, 2019 by Zack Naylor

Tags Empathy, Podcast, Ux

Episode 34 highlights with Jason Voiovich:

Jason’s background in marketing and consumerism as well as what led him to become an author on the topics
The pitfalls of focusing too much on analytics and quantitative data to understand your customers
Why empathy is a key to the future of our work and society
Jason’s research about empathy
The connection between empathy and burnout… and what you can do about it
Doing less to get better results in UX, research and marketing
What does it mean to be scientific versus “scientism”?

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 33 with Kate Towsey on ResearchOps, User Research Repositories and Strategic Impact

Posted on November 27, 2018September 19, 2019 by Zack Naylor

Tags Podcast, Research Ops, Researchops, Ux Research

Episode 33 highlights with Kate Towsey:

Kate’s background and how she got into user research and ResearchOps
What it was like to “research the researchers”
The global ResearchOps community and how it all began
Research repositories and libraries
Leading research operations at Atlassian
How and why the ResearchOps community grew to what it is now
Kate’s definition for #WhatisResearchOps?

Organize and Share Your User Research with a Central Repository

Posted on November 19, 2018November 20, 2020 by Zack Naylor

Tags Key Insights, Research Ops, Researchops, User Research, User Research Repository, Ux Nuggets, Ux Research

Create Company Wide Empathy with a User Research Repository

Creating insights to share and act on is the most important work you do as a UX or user research professional.

Your research must create a sense of empathy for the people you’re designing for with your team and company. This means your insights and findings must be clear, findable and actionable.

With rapidly changing expectations and methods for communication and sharing knowledge, it’s critical to start building a sustainable research practice right away that builds institutional knowledge of your customers.

Doing so generates better intuition and decision making, as well as wide spread empathy at your organization.

Investing in a user research repository to organize, search and share everything you learn from customer research early helps you accomplish these things and build true customer empathy in your organization.