Organize your ideas with Mural’s affinity mapping tool

Nothing beats the rush of reaching the point in your brainstorm where ideas start to take on a life of their own‌ — ‌but the path there is rarely linear. An affinity diagram, otherwise known as the K-J method, was developed by Jiro Kawakita in the 1960s to address water supply challenges in Nepal. Today, this method can help your team organize ideas or problems into conceptual categories and pave the way for major breakthroughs. 

Why use Mural as your affinity diagram creator?

Brains dumps tend to be chaotic. And while a teeny bit of chaos can be fun, your goal in a brainstorming session is to come out with an idea or plan of action you can actually use. When you use Mural as an affinity diagram creator, you can organize your ideas, identify patterns, and create a method within the madness. An affinity diagram in Mural can help you:

• Simplify complex problems: If the goal of your brainstorm is to solve a problem, making an affinity diagram can break down complicated concepts into smaller, more manageable ideas or tasks. 
• Organize information: It can be hard to see throughlines within all the information in front of you, but creating a diagram can help you bucket information and tackle categories one at a time. 
• Visualize ideas: Sometimes an idea doesn’t really come together until it takes on a tangible, visual form. An affinity diagram in Mural can help you get everything out there and start molding ideas. 
• Get everyone involved: Brainstorms are meant to be collaborative! An affinity chart can bring everyone to the table to share their unique ideas, build off existing ones, and see patterns others may have missed. 

Top benefits of Mural's affinity diagram software for teams

We won’t lie‌ — ‌an affinity chart is nothing fancy. It only really requires two things: a place to put ideas and a way to lump those ideas into categories. And while this can be done on a physical whiteboard, Mural’s visual collaboration tools can help you create a cleaner, easier, simpler, affinity diagram. Here are a few Mural features that can help make brainstorming fun and productive:

• Designed to be collaborative: Using an affinity diagram maker that’s literally invented for remote collaboration makes it easy for anyone anywhere to share input and build on each other’s ideas‌ — ‌synchronously or asynchronously. With flexible sharing permissions, you decide who gets to contribute. 
• Templates for days: It’s not hard to build an affinity map from scratch, but it’s even easier to build one from a template! Start from our mind map template or rose, bud, and thorn template, which conveniently already has categories built in.
• Sticky notes: Traditional affinity diagrams often use physical sticky notes. Put down the Post-Its! Mural’s digital sticky notes are instantly shareable, moveable, and can be color-coded so you know exactly who contributed what. 
• Infinitely expandable: Keep the ideas coming! Don’t throw out an idea just because it doesn’t fit on the board‌ — ‌Mural whiteboards are infinitely resizeable, so the sky’s the limit. 
• Voting: Democracy is alive and well in a brainstorm. Once you have your ideas out there, Mural allows your team to vote on which ones have the most legs. 

Learn more about Mural’s features and how they can help you come up with ideas. 

How Mural can help you overcome challenges with digital affinity mapping

We all know how easy it is for a brainstorm or collaborative session to fly off the rails‌ — ‌and while affinity mapping isn’t a perfect science, using Mural as your affinity mapping tool can help you tackle some of these common challenges: 

• Too much information: It’s difficult to find order in chaos if more information keeps flowing in. Try to limit the scope of your affinity diagram and put a cap on information. Mural’s flexible sharing permissions ensures you don’t have too many cooks in the kitchen. 
• Lack of a clear objective: You need to know what you’re brainstorming before you begin‌ — ‌you’d be surprised how often teams don’t know what problem they’re trying to solve! Mural’s guided templates can help you organize your goals and gather relevant information from stakeholders before the brain meld begins. 
• Nonparticipation: “Folks? Anyone?” Not a question you want to be asking when trying to come up with ideas collaboratively! Mural’s virtual collaboration tools like sticky notes encourage everyone to get involved even if they don’t have the loudest voice in the room. 
• Subjectivity: Everyone has different experiences and biases, and may interpret or group information differently. Mural can help overcome this with our AI features‌ — ‌the “cluster” feature can identify and group sticky notes with similar themes and group them without subjectivity or bias.

Affinity diagram tool best practices for a seamless ideation process

Here are tips on how to make your brainstorming session and affinity diagram creation as smooth and productive as possible:

• Define your objective. What problem are you trying to solve? What are your constraints? What metrics are you trying to hit? A project-specific OKR template can help you identify your goals and determine how to measure success. 
• Gather the right people. While diverse opinions are valuable, a productive ideation session depends on insight from people with perspective and experience relevant to the problem at hand. Eliminate noise and tangents by only inviting the appropriate teams or people to add to your affinity diagram. A simple stakeholder map can help you identify relevant teams.
• Create an agenda. Even a free-flowing brainstorm can benefit from some structure. A study by UC Berkeley found that pre-brainstorm planning can increase idea generation up to 30%. Plan out the phases of your brainstorm session and the time you can commit to each:
  
  • Icebreaker
  • Introduce the problem or opportunity
  • Collect ideas
  • Group ideas into categories
  • Vote and prioritize 
  • Plan next steps

Keep it lean. Not every idea has legs. There’s no shame in shouting out a “bad” idea‌ — ‌sometimes they even pave the way for good ideas — but they may overwhelm your diagram. Eliminate ideas from your affinity map that aren’t feasible or don’t fit neatly into any category. You can always keep them in your back pocket for a future project.