# Collating, Clustering, and Voting
# Phase: 🎨 Problem shaping
Focus: Converge, align
IN BRIEF
Time commitment: A few minutes to a few hours, depending on complexity of material being evaluated
Difficulty: Moderate
Materials needed: Insights, problems or other items to be synthesized, meeting space (physical or virtual), voting mechanism if needed (physical dot stickers, virtual emoji voting, etc), participants from a variety of technical and cultural perspectives (the more of these, the more useful)
Who should participate: User experience designers, visual designers, product/project owners, community specialists, developers, and/or users
Best for: Synthesizing and ranking diverse information in order to enable decisions about next steps
# About this tool
Collating, clustering and voting aren't so much tools in themselves as they are techniques that enable a wide range of other tools in this toolkit. To that end, we've gathered a number of approaches to collating, clustering and voting here.
# Approaches for collating, clustering and synthesizing
- Synthesizing insights from user interviews (opens new window): Tips for moving from conversational notes to more concrete insights. This guide talks specifically about synthesizing feedback gathered during user interviews, but can also work well when summarizing a variety of opinion-based exercises.
- Using affinity diagrams (opens new window) to cluster brief notes from brainstorms, mental maps and similar activities
- Idea bundling (opens new window): Like affinity diagramming, but with the addition of more formal, overarching themes
- "Ways to grow" framework (opens new window) for clustering potential solutions on a matrix of novelty versus user expertise
- A workshop recipe (opens new window) for when more in-depth, synchronous analysis and synthesis of user research results is helpful
- Creating broad concepts (opens new window) from already-clustered insights or proposed solutions
# Approaches for voting
- How to do dot voting more effectively (opens new window)
- Guide to a wide variety of other voting ideas (opens new window), including dot voting, the Four Categories method (ranking on rationality, delight, and more), the "now/wow/how" matrix, the Six Thinking Hats method, and others.
# All-in-one
- The KJ method (opens new window) combines collating, clustering and voting into a single exercise