Here are three advantages this method offers your team:
- Knowledge and Gut Feeling
- The entire team dives deeply into the results of the interviews and observations, gaining a wealth of information, as well as a gut feeling, for the users.
- Perspective Shift
- Individual mentions and observations are connected into clusters and networks and are repeatedly restructured throughout the exercise. With the help of experienced coaches, the team can thus set aside their own thought structures and fully embrace the user perspective.
- Flexibility
- If you already know a lot about a topic and are familiar with the user categories, you can adapt the affinity mapping and proceed deductively. In doing so, you establish the categories before the analysis and then extract relevant statements and observations from the data. This approach is useful if you want to delve deeper into individual categories and view them specifically from the user's perspective, or as a plausibility check to determine if your previous assumptions are correct.
