PROGRAMMING

Affinity Visualization Tool

Description

Designed and implemented a ZUI Java application that supports features for helping users overcome the difficulties encountered when creating affinity diagrams using physical materials, such as a white board and sticky notes.

Problem

Affinity diagrams are a essential components of contextual design, allowing designers to view high level abstractions and general trends in large amounts of data. As such, one would expect the availability of specialized tools for creating these diagrams. Unfortunately, there are not many tools in existence expressly for this purpose, and those that exist fall short of providing an adequate environment for authoring and visualizing these documents.

Affinity diagrams are typically created from words and phrases written on sticky notes and grouped together on a large surface. This presents several problems, especially when dealing with large quantities of data. While there are no explicit limitations on the number of notes contained within an Affinity diagram, affinities in the order of 200+ notes are typical. Issues that arise when dealing with large affinity diagrams include:

1. Finding an area large enough to contain all the notes
2. Manipulating notes
3. Visualizing a large quantity of notes efficiently
4. Storage and Transportation of notes
5. Classifying and Searching for notes
6. Sharing and accomplishing collaborative work on the diagram with other team members/stakeholders

Solution

The software application my partner and I developed addresses the shortcomings listed above by leveraging several interaction techniques. The application supports an infinitely large workspace, multiple data visualizations, dynamic group layout and repositioning, save/restore of diagrams, export to jpg, and innovative search features. In addition to a standard tree view, the application supports efficient viewing of a large dataset by providing a Zoomable User Interface (ZUI), implemented by leveraging the Piccolo tookit. An enhanced brainstorming feature leverages Google Sets for generating lists of related keywords from established affinities.

Please view the writeup for more details: AffinityToolPaper.pdf