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Affinity mapping 0:48
A 48-second explainer of Affinity mapping, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.
Try the interactive Affinity mapping demo
What this video covers
Affinity mapping is a way of making sense of qualitative research by grouping individual observations - one per sticky note - into clusters of related ideas, then naming the themes that emerge. Instead of imposing categories up front, you let the structure rise from the data itself, turning a wall of scattered notes into a handful of patterns you can act on.
Scattered, the notes were just noise - a dozen unrelated gripes. Grouped, the same notes fell into two clear stories, and the theme names almost wrote themselves. That's affinity mapping: the pattern was always in the data; clustering is what makes it visible.