Affinity Diagram Template
Organize and cluster ideas and data in order to effectively develop solutions.
About the Affinity Diagram template
What is an affinity diagram?
An affinity diagram is a visual brainstorming tool that allows teams to organize ideas according to their natural relationships. We’ve all participated in brainstorming sessions that seemed to go nowhere, and with so many people are sharing a large number of ideas and perspectives, it can be difficult to distill these conversations into a coherent takeaway. This is where an affinity diagram comes in handy.
Benefits of using an affinity diagram
You can use an affinity diagram to generate, organize, and consolidate information that comes out of a brainstorming session. Whether you’re building a product, working through a complex problem, establishing a process, or piecing apart an issue, an affinity diagram is a useful and simple framework.
Incorporate everyone’s perspective
An affinity diagram gives each team member the opportunity to share their thoughts and ideas about the topic. By collecting everyone’s brainstorming ideas, an affinity diagram functions as a visual representation of a brainstorm that everyone can add to.
Find connections between ideas
Affinity diagrams are also a great way to discover novel connections between various different components of a project. Synthesizing ideas into a simple visual framework allows teams to develop new solutions that they might otherwise miss.
Organize team thoughts and ideas
Finally, an affinity diagram is a valuable tool of organization that divides a project into various discrete components and allows you to dive deeper into each individual component. Organizing thoughts in this way can help you break up tasks and delegate responsibility.
When to use affinity diagrams
Teams and organizations use affinity diagrams in a variety of situations. When your brainstorming session feels like it’s devolving and there are too many ideas to capture, or when the issues are too large and complex to grasp, you can use an affinity diagram to cut through the chaos. But it’s not only useful during chaotic meetings; you can also use an affinity diagram whenever a consensus is needed, when analyzing data such as survey results, when grouping ideas into themes, or when organizing datasets.
Create your own affinity diagram
Making your own affinity diagram with your team is easy. Miro’s whiteboard tool is the perfect canvas to create and share your own. Get started by selecting this Affinity Diagram template. Then, follow these simple steps:
Step 1: Ideation
The first step of the process is to start recording the ideas that you’d like to sort into categories. Get everyone in the team involved and ask them to put forward a few ideas.
Step 2: Diagramming
Next, examine the ideas and try to find related concepts. Then, discuss with the group and start to tentatively draw connections between ideas. Invite team members to add sticky notes sharing their perspective. When you notice related concepts, group them together. Repeat this step until you’ve grouped all the concepts.
Step 3: Grouping
Repeat step 2 until you’ve grouped all the concepts. It’s okay if there are concepts that seem to defy a grouping. You can return to those later.
Step 4: Team discussion
Discuss with your team and make sure everyone is on the same page. Do you agree with the groups? How should you label them? Do you need to make any changes
Step 5: Synthesize ideas
Finally, combine these groups into “supergroups”, to synthesize ideas into a more cohesive whole.. The completed affinity diagram can be used to enhance future project management and inform decision making.
What is the purpose of an affinity diagram?
The purpose of an affinity diagram is to generate ideas and organize them in a manner which draws out the various connections and relationships between different ideas. Affinity diagrams are visual brainstorm tools, but with a focus more on the connections between ideas.
When are affinity diagrams used?
Affinity diagrams are used by businesses and organizations to analyze data, generate ideas, and organize projects or analysis. Any time you want to more clearly organize data or ideas to generate some useful conclusions, an affinity diagram can be used.
Get started with this template right now. It’s free
Flyer Maker
Whether it’s a client party or a nonprofit fundraiser, your event needs one key thing to be a smashing success: people to show up. That’s why promoting it is such an important part of the planning—and creating and sending a flyer is the first step. These single-page files will grab your guests’ attention and give them the key details, such as the time, date, and location (and if it’s a fundraiser, who/what the funds will benefit). This template will let you lay out text and customize a flyer design.
Fishbone Diagram
What’s the best way to solve any problem your team faces? Root it out. That means identify the problem’s causes, and fishbone diagrams are designed to help you do it. Also known as Ishikawa Diagram (named after Japanese quality control expert Kaoru Ishikawa), fishbone diagrams empower teams to visualize all possible causes of a problem, to explore and understand how they fit together holistically. Teams can also use fishbone diagrams as a jumping-off point to brainstorm what the root cause could be.
Organizational Chart
Who makes up the team? What roles do they play? Who does each member report to? An organizational chart, or org chart, can answer it all at a glance. Ideal for onboarding new employees, these visual diagrams plot out company structure and the chain of command to help your team members understand reporting relationships, their role, and how they fit into the broader organization. Our template lets you choose your own chart structure and easily plot the connections between employees, roles, and departments.
Daily Standup
The entire team meets to review the day before and discuss the day ahead. These daily meetings, also known as “scrums,” are brief but powerful — they identify roadblocks, give each team member a voice, foster collaboration, keep progress on track, and ultimately keep teams working together effectively. This template makes it so easy for you to plan daily standups for your sprint team. It all starts with picking a date and time, creating an agenda, and sticking with the same format throughout the sprint.
HEART
Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success. Those are the pillars of user experience — which is why they serve as the key metrics in the HEART framework. Developed by the research team at Google, this framework gives larger companies an accurate way to measure user experience at scale, which you can then reference throughout the product development lifecycle. While the HEART framework uses five metrics, you might not need all five for every project — choose the ones that will be most useful for your company and project.
Parking Lot Matrix
When the creative energy is flowing, a workshop or meeting will yield a lot of new ideas — but not all are on-topic or currently feasible. Roll them right onto a parking lot matrix, a simple, effective tool for separating the best ideas from those that are promising but could use more research or discussion. This template will let you easily make your own parking lot matrix, which will come in especially handy during long meetings (and when you have teammates who tend to go off-topic).