Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Finally, the Affinity supports
interaction
with the data. The Affinity
Wall Walk
(de-
scribed below) encourages designers to engage with and interact with the data. Interaction
is important: any presentation of the data that lets the team get away with being passive
and receptive will not help the team go from the data to design. To truly incorporate new
information, people need to manipulate it and interact with it in ways that stimulate design
ideas.
The Affinity is a model of good communication design (which is why it is so popular):
thestructurechunksrelevantthemesintomanageablesectionswhichleadtheteamthrough
the data; the story language in the labels and individual notes evokes users' experience,
which stimulates design ideas relevant to the point of view of the model. Together, they
give designers a way in to understand the data and to interact with it with design implica-
tions.
The Affinity Diagram has been used and loved by design teams as a way to capture in-
formation and present it to others for a long time. Any project will benefit from building
an Affinity Diagram. This data can usefully be revisited throughout the project, by other
teams, and in the future. It's worth putting online so that it can be more easily shared.
The challenge of communicating field data is to make complexity manageable and con-
sumable. The Affinity Diagram does this well, so the elements which make it successful
provided us a guide for understanding how to help teams use data. Below we discuss how
we used these principles of communication design for other models.
4.2 CONTEXTUAL DESIGN MODELS
ContextualDesignusesmultipleparallelrepresentationstoshowdifferentaspectsofusers'
work and life. Each representation is coherent in itself, and the team can look across them
to see the full richness of the user's practice. The thinking process used to build the Affin-
ity Diagram is the pattern for all model consolidations: first break individual observations
into meaningful, self-contained parts; then organize those parts to reveal themes and the
structure of the practice appropriate to the point of view of the model; finally represent the
themes in a way that can be easily consumed by a design team, ensuring that the most im-
portant insights are accessible. Here's a quick look at some of the primary models of Con-
textual Design and how they are consolidated.
The Day in the Life
model(
Figure4.4
)isbroughttogethertoshowtheoverallstructure
of users' days and how work and home tasks fit into time throughout the day, suppor-
ted by mobile and non-mobile technology. To recognize the common pattern across users
for the this model, the observations that matter are the small, focused activities which oc-
cur throughout the day in different places, at different times, on different platforms, which
work together to get larger activities done.
