Review all of the material gathered to date yourself.

At the meeting

• Explain the problem to the participants, distribute pad of known items and if appropriate allow participants to create their own items as a brainstorming activity.
• Ask participants to stick their notes on the flip chart paper or wall, close to any other notes on a similar topic.
• If designing, include users as participants, and encourage participants to group items from a user perspective.
• Encourage participants to discuss and achieve consensus.
• Once consensus has been reached on the grouping, use a differently coloured sticky note to name each group.

The items within their groupings are the output of this method. Sometimes you may find there is a small group who will create an alternative grouping, and sometimes participants will attempt to impose a structure on the groupings themselves. Always a good idea to take one or more photographs of the result as soon as the session is over.

Describe the skills or interests of the participants, and how much experience they have of this or similar applications. This is important for credibility.

The most important safeguard is not to impose your own pre-conceptions on the material, and to stress to the participants that what you want from them is how they would group the items. The best solution is usually not a purely logical one or a purely technical one (if it was, this exercise would be fairly redundant!)

If an interface is being designed, then the design team usually take this kind of output on board; however, technical issues and perhaps also policy issues may require negotiation.

Beyer, H. & Holtzblatt, K. (1998). Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

Affinity diagramming to analyse usability issues.

General method How to Cluster and Bundle Ideas and Facts

• Examples from the Six Sigma web site
• Example from a health-care quality scenario
• Inland Revenue example
• Israel Aircraft Industries example.