Creating Affinity Diagrams with Product Context Analyzer
An Affinity Diagram groups desired outcomes or pain points into meaningful themes, making patterns across user research visible that represent human-centred quality objectives or key issue areas. This shared view helps teams align on priorities and guides strategic design decisions based on what users actually experience and care about.
Specify the activity, responsibility, journey, or user group you are interested in
Example: Forecasting sales for a pharmaceutical product line in a specific region
Describe the activity in a single sentence without prescribing a particular product or solution.
Optionally include context such as who is performing the activity and under what circumstances.
Adding context helps make the analysis more domain-specific.
The analysis takes several minutes depending on the scope and number of tasks identified
As soon as the analysis is completed, you can open it and look at all artifacts
The quick access view provides direct access to all artifacts grouped by UX method
You can also browse all results by stakeholder, task or task object by clicking on the left icons
Insights are synthesized view on the context-of-use analysis across tasks and stakeholders
Example: Key Opportunity Areas | Key Issue Areas
You will find two Affinity Diagrams, one clustering all pain points and one clustering all desired outcomes
Affinity Diagrams cluster related desired outcomes or pain points into meaningful topic areas and themes
Use the emerging themes to identify strategically relevant quality dimensions or key issue areas
Use the expand and collapse function to view the underlying original items linked to the original context of use
Use the underlying items to trace each theme back to detailed context-of-use information
Start with the clustered pain points or desired outcomes and spend workshop time discussing what the themes mean rather than manually constructing the affinity diagram.
Review whether individual findings belong together, whether important distinctions have been lost, and whether the resulting themes reflect how the team understands the problem space.
Use recurring pain-point themes to surface broader issue areas that may warrant strategic or design attention.
Use themes across desired outcomes to reveal higher-level human-centred quality objectives that can guide product and design decisions.
Discuss patterns across many individual findings without requiring participants to work through every underlying item first.