Challenges and Opportunities in the Design of Digital Tools for Distributed Affinity Diagramming

TY - GEN

T1 - Challenges and Opportunities in the Design of Digital Tools for Distributed Affinity Diagramming

AU - Remy, Christian

AU - Harboe, Gunnar

AU - Frich Pedersen, Jonas

AU - Biskjaer, Michael Mose

AU - Dalsgaard, Peter

PY - 2021/4

Y1 - 2021/4

N2 - Affinity diagramming is an oft-used sense-making technique in design research and practice to analyze qualitative data, utilizing a large number of sticky notes on walls. Over the past two decades, several digital tools have been tried and tested to augment or even replace the physical affinity diagramming process. Even so, the analog process usually prevails. We developed an online collab- oration tool specifically tailored toward affinity diagramming to explore the challenges and opportunities of such a system in the particular case where the distributed teams do not have access to co-located settings. Here, we present a user experience study of five groups (dyads) of students based on a one-hour diagramming task under remote observation, followed by semi-structured interviews. Our study contributes three distinct insights to inform future work, namely that digital affinity diagrams 1) reduce the awareness of co-participants’ actions, 2) provide fewer cues about ownership and use than physical diagrams, and 3) save time, improve manipula- tion, and overview. We end with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities for the design of digital tools for distributed teams involved in sense-making tasks.

AB - Affinity diagramming is an oft-used sense-making technique in design research and practice to analyze qualitative data, utilizing a large number of sticky notes on walls. Over the past two decades, several digital tools have been tried and tested to augment or even replace the physical affinity diagramming process. Even so, the analog process usually prevails. We developed an online collab- oration tool specifically tailored toward affinity diagramming to explore the challenges and opportunities of such a system in the particular case where the distributed teams do not have access to co-located settings. Here, we present a user experience study of five groups (dyads) of students based on a one-hour diagramming task under remote observation, followed by semi-structured interviews. Our study contributes three distinct insights to inform future work, namely that digital affinity diagrams 1) reduce the awareness of co-participants’ actions, 2) provide fewer cues about ownership and use than physical diagrams, and 3) save time, improve manipula- tion, and overview. We end with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities for the design of digital tools for distributed teams involved in sense-making tasks.

KW - Affinity diagramming

KW - Global virtual teams

KW - Qualitative analysis

KW - Sense-making

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85104929175&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3452853.3452871

DO - 10.1145/3452853.3452871

M3 - Article in proceedings

SN - 978-1-4503-8757-6

SP - 1

EP - 5

BT - ECCE 2021 - Proceedings of the 32nd European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics

A2 - Marti, Patrizia

A2 - Parlangeli, Oronzo

A2 - Recupero, Annamaria

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

CY - New York

T2 - European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics

Y2 - 26 April 2021 through 29 April 2021

ER -