#5 Affinity Diagramming for UX
Analyzing and understanding the research data
This is the fifth article looking back on my pathway and progress through the Professional Diploma in UX Design course with the UX Design Institute. I have so far gone through some of the research tasks including the Competitive Benchmark, Online Survey, and Competitive Usability Testing with Note-taking. The affinity diagram will be used as a tool to make sense out of the research data, and then to create a customer journey map.
Preparation
The first thing was to gather the research so far. Select the important outputs form the previous research tasks, print some, and buy a big bag of post-its. I had arranged for a friend to collaborate with me. He’s a data science engineer at a top Korean IT company. Though he had heard of an affinity diagram session, he had never known what it entails. So I took some time to explain this to him first. I gave an outline of the FlyUX project, including the UXDI brief for the affinity diagram session, and some web links that explain the idea behind the affinity session. We arranged a date and time, then I shared some of the data (not to overwhelm) with him a couple of days before the session. I included the usability test videos, too. It’s a lot of material for someone to review. Being afraid that there wouldn’t be enough time to go through it on the day we arranged, I got to work the night before and started organizing the material. I did get a head start on picking out some notes and getting them wrote up on post-its. This is also good to speed up things on the day, as a kind of example of the notes that should be taken from the research material.
I set a time of 45 minutes for the note taking. It could have gone on longer, though I felt it was best to stick to the allocated time and keep on moving.
Competitive benchmark notes — were pretty straightforward to pick out and write up. I was satisfied with my benchmark project, though in the future I would definitely try to keep it as concise and as directly related to the goals as possible. The document was quite extensive and there were many
Survey results- It was definitely a good idea to prepare this document and compile the output data, while also picking out the main result achieved form each question. This makes writing up notes really straight forward.
Usability Testing / Note taking- The colour coding (simple red-negative, green-positive, blue-generic) and lots of quotes is important when drawing up notes for the infinity diagram. Having as much context as possible really helps not only yourself but the collaborators you have given the research material to.
Getting Sorted
As you can see above, I ended up with quite a few notes for this. I used a different colour post-it for each project material.
(Blue- Usability Test Notes #1, Yellow- Usability Test Notes #2, Green- Competitive Benchmark, Yellow- Survey)
I did find as progressing through this that there were actually quite a few duplicates.These were stacked on top of each other, and it does show a repeated point coming through, even more so when different colour notes were stacked as it shows different research tasks coming to the same conclusion.
Groups started to emerge pretty quickly. Some groups were obvious when dealing with airline and flight booking data, such as the ‘home’, ‘calendar’, and ‘payment’ ones. Though some others emerged such as ‘navigation issues’ and ‘summary pricing’. These are just two, and not the only two, that helped solidify goals and areas to work on specifically in the coming projects. I’ll go through each category individually and give a brief outline.
*Also, just to note I did rebuild these in a different space after the actual session in order to photograph clearly.
- Home
An obvious choice of category title. I felt there wasn’t any need to be creative here. This is an area I already had in my mind that needed improvement compared to the competitors. Most of this was taken form the benchmark document and is more so directly related to home screen layout and UI.
2. |Calendar and Search
Competitors have varied calendar selection designs and processes. Some very effective, while some not so. The above category has given some very specific and useful points to keep in mind. These were referred to while designing the flight search and calendar, and while not all were used, some were important in shaping my search and calendar.
3. |Fares
When competitive benchmarking, and usability testing, the same problems came up in the area of displaying fares. It’s an area causing a lot of confusion with varied names of fare types and hard to locate information. This category assisted in keeping a concise fare options and upgrades screen.
4. |Filter
An area that could easily be overlooked, the filter & sort priority/hierarchy was established on the flyUX app design based on the likes of the above data from multiple sources. I ended up keeping the main sorting filter in two categories — Cheapest and Fastest. The actual filter (funnel) icon slides a drawer containing more filtering options (of which does need extra work, but I will detail that in the coming design phase articles.
5. |Timeline & Options
Timeline is related to the indication of overall flow through the booking experience. This is very varied throughout airline booking systems. This section helped in pushing me to think about these notes. Why is there no timeline present on step 1? Why doesn’t the timeline change to the next step for the next screen? That led me later to logically organize the timeline, and which screens/booking steps are best kept together as the same step. I will present the Customer Journey Map and Flow Diagram on the next two articles where these groupings become apparent.
6. |Transfer, Save, Share, Member
The issues in the areas here of Saving, Sharing, and Membership were clear while undertaking the research tasks. Some of these such as the share sheet issues are also on the developer level, and are outlined in the final handover wireframes.
However, the transfer issues would not have been so evident without usability testing. These issues really help in overcoming the problem that a lot of airlines have when displaying flight information.
7. |Goals
Many of the user goals are mixed in with other categories, though I wanted to keep these top level goal related notes separate as a reminder of the main reason users are coming to the flight booking app or site.
8. |Navigating (and issues)
These notes were directly related to the users steps, moving through the booking. Mostly, they’re connected to issues that should be overcome or kept in mind at the very least when designing.
9. |Summary & Pricing
You can see a lot of issues become clear from the various research tasks. I don’t consider all of these actual issues though. I see them as pointers in designing a better, more refined booking experience than the competitors. This category and the next category were heavy on pricing issues. Each Competitor Usability Test proved that airlines have a probelm in consistently displaying price throughout the booking. This is the cause for so much confusion among customers, and as shown in two of the usability tests customers would be willing to end their booking and go elsewhere because of it.
10. |Extras
These notes while also showing pricing issues are more depicting seating and baggage issues and points. Clear display of price, seating descriptions, and baggage were points here that piece together a whole area where improvement is required to offer a logical and clear booking step within the whole booking process.
11. |Payment
Issues are encountered during the last stages of booking due to reasons such as not enough varied methods of payment, inconsistent pricing throughout the booking, hidden extras, and problems with certain cards. If a user encounters an error or an issue late in the booking process, after spending valuable time adding the information to get to the results they wanted, it’s going to create very negative emotions regarding the booking experience and especially towards the company in question.
12. |Shocks & Annoyance
This area is last for a reason. These could have been fit into all the categories above, though we saw it fit to keep a category that represented alone, various aspects of the booking process that actually annoyed, or shocked the user. Most of the above would be cause for the user to finish up, pack up, and head off to another app or site.
Completion
As i mentioned, after finishing up the affinity session, I relocated/rebuilt the post-it notes in my own office for the purpose of putting together one clear image.
Categories are colour boxed to display categories I consider to be group-able. eg. orange — Pricing & Summary and Payment. These groupings help when referring back later on when creating the customer journey map.
It’s an enjoyable task and really helps paint that all-round picture of the research undertaken previously. Now on to the Customer Journey Map…
