How I sorted out my love life using the UX method affinity mapping

Eleftheria Anastasiadou
Bootcamp
Published in
6 min readApr 2, 2021
The affinity mapping board

During the pandemic, the world slowed down and I took a step back to collect my thoughts, review life decisions in an attempt to improve my future. What choices could I make to bring my life closer to the expectations I have.

Having been single for a while now, previously jumping from one person to another, this long hunt that many people might find themselves trapped in seems excessive, I have decided to sit down and look into what I have been doing wrong when searching for partners. That’s why I chose to use the UX method affinity mapping, to understand the patterns I have followed and what these choices are based on. Hopefully, the results will help me make better decisions in the future and have better luck finding the right person.

To respect the privacy of subjects “Any resemblance between the characters in this picture and any persons, living or dead, is a miracle”.

Research phase

As a UX professional, I started by researching exactly what affinity mapping is and how to effectively use it.

Affinity Mapping is a practice used to organize ideas or users’ insights. It allows large numbers of ideas stemming from brainstorming to be sorted into groups, based on their natural relationships, for review and analysis.”

This is what Wikipedia tells us, but how can we put it into practice?

I love how Alison explains it in her blog “When it comes to categorizing information, nothing is obvious. The way you perceive one bit of information can differ from the next person. Well, explaining that is difficult because it’s a bit like trying to explain how your brain works.”

Other industries using affinity mapping are psychology, marketing, medical sciences, sociology, and IT programming. I couldn’t find all the names from each different industry but a similar process is the Venn diagram, which shows how to categorize items to better understand them — it was created by John Venn in the 1880s.

Problem

Discover why my love life is a disaster by defining the wrong patterns.

The process

I started my affinity mapping by choosing 6 (4 males-2 females) of the most recent partners I have had in the last 5 years. For each one I created 2 lists, one with all the good things I remembered from them and one with the bad. On the bottom layer, I mentioned all the things I thought I was doing wrong, so I could highlight any similarities in my behavior, as my best friend has always said to me: “you are the only common thing in all your exes”.

Each participant had a different color on their sticky note.

Affinity mapping steps:

  1. Document all good & bad elements or observations from each user on sticky notes
  2. Pay attention to any patterns and create a group for each pattern
  3. Name each group
  4. Acknowledge the why with a statement from each group
Final groups

Results

Many times users say they are doing certain things, or think they are doing those things but in reality, if you observe them they are not. In this case, I discovered things I would never believe I was doing and it was quite scary to sit and realize why these certain patterns were happening. I notice that I was projecting the future with really high expectations from people that I didn’t know that well. I repeated this pattern for the last 4 subjects. I received this pattern from the blue stickers, which were the stickers I used for my behavior to them.

The sticker notes from my behavior to them

Another pattern I discovered was how successful, these people were. After all, it seems that I was attracted to that “alpha male” figure. Most of the subjects were very successful and in top rank in their industries. They will prioritize their job above everything and they spare just a bit of their free time for the rest of life’s activities (such as partners).

This led me to another conclusion, most of the colors within the success-workaholic group were the same ones as the group of substance dependence, so it seems that great success comes with some addictions. I am not generalizing to all populations I only speak for the people I interacted with.

Similar colors to the groups’ successful career and substance dependence

Following this, another group was created based on the feelings I had such as emotional safety and security. I realized that I was less happy with the successful people and less emotionally secure. Yes, I love being surrounded by successful people, but do I have what it takes to stay next to one longer? With the groups that have been created, it seems that I need to top up my confidence a bit more and my own personal security and autonomy, because in the future if I choose again to be next to a successful person I will still feel less secure and inferior.

Less similar colors between my emotional safety next to the successful

The biggest realization out of this method was that the primary criteria that I use for a person were physical appearance. That was like a hit in the face because until now I was thinking the exact opposite. I was raised in a family that always reminds me physical appearance is nothing and you should never rely on this for yourself and others as well. Having this in my mind and seeing the results of this group was a big hit. In the future I need to make sure to give chances to people I wouldn’t think of I will like them and maybe, who knows maybe I will get happier.

Physical appearance stickers

Conclusion

I used the method of affinity mapping to understand the common patterns I follow when choosing a partner. I realized that:

  • I am attracted to successful people
  • If I want to be next to successful people I need to boost my confidence and autonomy
  • I should not have high expectations and not projecting peoples’ behavior
  • Give more chances to people that I wouldn’t think of feeling attracted at the first sight
  • Physical appearance is not always a must
  • Sometimes successful people come with addictions, which I am not responsible for solving

Thank you for reading this, I hope you find it useful and you use it to discover things for yourself. If you try it please find me and let me know of your results.

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Bootcamp
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Published in Bootcamp

From idea to product, one lesson at a time. Bootcamp is a collection of resources and opinion pieces about UX, UI, and Product. To submit your story: https://tinyurl.com/bootspub1

Eleftheria Anastasiadou
Eleftheria Anastasiadou

Written by Eleftheria Anastasiadou

Junior UX/UI Designer Clinical fitness trainer Professional dancer 👩‍💻💃🏋️‍♀️🧘‍♀️

Responses (5)

What are your thoughts?

Love this application of affinity mapping!

I love this! I feel seen.. Thank you for creating this. I think I may have to give this method a try for myself ;P

This is so amazing! As a fellow designer, props to you. I have done similar affinity mapping to my love life, and have gotten more and more clarity --not to the extent that you did, which is amazing!