I543 INTERACTION DESIGN METHODS SPRING 2014
AFFINITY DIAGRAM URVASHI GUPTA KERRI ZHANG
BACKGROUND INFO Research method
Data Analysis method
Contextual Inquiry
Affinity Diagram
12:00 PM, Feb. 9th, 2014
March. 1st, 2014
Subjects Subject -1
File cabinet as shoe rack Computer table as microwave table
• Female, 24 years of age • First-year graduate student, major in Computer Science. The subject has been living with her roommates in a townhouse for the last 4 months. She is from India and came to the USA for her Masters about 4 months back. She got most of the furniture currently present in the house from the church furniture giveaway and hence she doesn’t have a lot of furniture in the house. This leads her roommates and her to “redesign” the little pieces of furniture they have and make the most use of it. This also helps them in saving money. Subject – 2 • Female, ~25 years of age • Student at IU, in SPEA. The subject just moved to a new house after her previous roommate graduated. She likes to personalize her home and loves antique furniture.
SUMMARY OF MAJOR INSIGHTS •
Constraints inspire creative thinking. •
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Personal style has influence on people’s everyday design. •
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For example, a taste in vintage style requires old furniture. Instead of buying new stuff which are painted old on purpose, redesigning useless things gives more space to customize.
Values and family traditions have influence on the habit to reuse and repurpose. •
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Repurpose other available materials to replace unavailable ones. For example, file cabinet as shoe rack because they couldn’t find real shoe rack at the giveaway and cutting ropes to make shower curtain rings because the supermarket ran out of rings and they happened to have ropes at hand.
The subject mentioned that she was taught to use what she has instead of buying new stuff. And her family like to reuse things too. For example, her mother used the dresser as a kitchen drawer and now she moved the dresser to her place and used it as a TV stand.
What is not of use to one might be of use to another. And this leads to Everyday design. •
The subject said that a lot of furniture in their house had come from the Church giveaway where people contribute furniture that is not useful to them anymore from their homes. This furniture is then given away to new International students coming into the University as they all need furniture and they don’t have a lot of money for it. Things that are not useful to some people anymore make other people’s homes.
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Most of the everyday design came from lack of space in the house. •
For our first subject, a lot of everyday design was caused because of lack of space – The microwave stand being used to keep common letters, the iron and random things that are not often used in the house. Similarly, many of the amazon boxes were used to store different things because of lack of space.
CONCEPT #1
App
Description This concept intends to build a interior design platform to help people who have a certain taste like our subject to exchange and trade their useless stuff. And at the same time, they can try their chosen stuff in their house to see how they look in the environment.
Upload different items to the app
• Take a panorama photo to build virtual house • Take photos of the useless things and upload them • Go through the products ( items other people uploaded ) and try the ones in the house One of the insights we found was that personal style has influence on people’s everyday design. Our subject likes vintage style but she doesn’t have enough materials to decorate her house and the stuff she saves don’t necessarily go with her style. Through this platform, she can exchange/buy something she likes but not useful to someone else with the useless things that don’t go with her style.
Take picture and upload a thing to the app
Try an item in your house The platform is shared
Exchange/buy the item
CONCEPT #2 Description Another insight we have is that values and family traditions have influence on the habit to reuse and repurpose. Our subjects were taught to use what they have at hand. They save many stuff but sometimes don’t know how to use them. This application concept may help to make useless things actually useful and also creative. The application requires to input pictures of the things that are needed to be reused. Every item can be regarded as an “ingredient”. The application will search how to use these “ingredient” to make a “dish”, that is, how to reuse these items. It will also provide the “recipe”(steps) to make the “dish”. The subject herself also reuses something in creative ways, she can upload her own “recipe” to share with others too.
CONCEPT #3 Description The last insight we had was that a lot of everyday design came from lack of space in the house and a need/desire to keep spaces uncluttered. This concept aligns with the idea of the Internet of Things of how different things can communicate with each other. In this concept, the different storage spaces like the file cabinet, the iron box and the Amazon boxes are talking to each other via the phone and trying to optimize the available space. The iron box is not meant to store books; hence it is asking the other spaces to take off the load from it.
CRITIQUE OF AFFINITY DIAGRAM 1. What works, what doesn’t? Pros
Cons
• The affinity diagram was a good tool for us to meaningfully cluster all of our data together
• Affinity diagramming is useful when data has to be broken down into layers and categories. However, If the data set is small, it is very difficult to create affinity diagram and reach insights.
• It helps to capture research-based insights. •
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It makes it easy to find the nature of problems and find themes and patterns. Since both of us input our “own” data, a large range of facts can be covered. Even though part of the data was overlapped, some data that was overlooked by one researcher was pulled out by the other researcher. We had different perspectives and focuses, but affinity diagram helped us consolidate lots of data into meaningful design criteria and build consensus in the team.
• Affinity diagram is also helpful to narrow down your focus when the problem space is huge like Everyday design. • It is also useful to get the whole team on the same page by finding a common interest among the team members.
• Affinity diagrams are not versatile; they can be used mainly to gain insights that is in the initial stages of design. It can not be used for design evaluation or testing.
2. What kind of insights can be generated ? •
Using Affinity diagrams, several areas of concerns get highlighted within the problem space, which lead to insights into what kinds of problems people run into in their daily lives.
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When the data is divided into categories, it is interesting to see how these categories relate to each other. And these relationships can lead to interesting insights.
3. What kinds of insights it fails to provide? •
The kind of insights that the diagram provides depends upon how things are categorized. If some post its do not fit into any category, they are kept aside because of which some interesting details may get missed.
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The Affinity diagram does not provide insights based on individual observations but based on the general categories.
REFLECTION •
Initially when we started with the Affinity diagram, we did not put in details on the post its which made it difficult for us to categorize them. But when we included more details, it became easier to see a theme/pattern between them.
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The way you categorize the post its is very important to reach insights. Initially we created layers on a different theme which did not help us to gain insights. Then we re-arranged them in a different way which then helped us get insights. Hence Affinity diagram might need several iterations before useful insights can be generated out of them.