Affinity mapping in Marvin

Affinity boards in Marvin are a dedicated workspace for you to sort your team’s qualitative data. Easily categorize all notes within a project to uncover themes, patterns, and next steps.

Affinity mapping in Marvin is unique because you can combine manual drag-and-drop sorting with AI-assisted identification of themes and notes*. Create your own custom workflow to create affinity boards with granular control.

*AI-assisted affinity mapping is only available for users on Enterprise plans

Affinity boards are specific to each project. On the home page, select your project and navigate to the “Analyze” tab. Select the “Boards” tab and click “Affinity mapping”. You can create a new board or access an existing affinity board in the project.

You have multiple options to find and add themes to an affinity board.

Give your theme a name. You can add up to 5 levels of sub-themes to it. For each board, you can create up to 25 themes.

You don’t need to start from scratch while sorting your notes. Use the existing labels in the projects as themes. Marvin will automatically group the notes that already have these labels under the themes.

Click “Actions” in the toolbar and select “Use labels as themes”. Check the labels you want to use. Corresponding child labels will automatically be added as sub-themes.

Users on Enterprise plans can also surface themes with Marvin’s AI. Marvin will scan all the notes in your project and detect overarching themes and sub-themes. It will also find notes that match these themes.

Select “AI Affinity Mapping” in the toolbar at the top.

Please note that you can only find themes with AI once in any project. We’ve restricted this to make sure no duplicate themes get created. We recommend you use this feature after you’ve gathered enough data in your project. However, you can always manually add more themes at any point.

Use any of the following methods to add notes to your themes. Only users on Enterprise plans will have access to the “Find notes with AI” feature.

You’ll see a section of all the “Unassigned notes” in the project on the left. Search for any note by keyword to locate it quickly. Just drag the note to the relevant theme.

Once added, this note will no longer be visible in the “Unassigned notes” section. You can also select multiple notes at once. Just check the mark that appears in the top left corner when you hover over any note. Then dag all the select notes into a theme.

Notes in affinity mapping can belong only to one theme or category. The only exception to this is if a note has multiple labels attached to it. If you use labels as themes, Marvin will add the same note to all the themes which have been converted from labels.

Another way to categorize your notes is to manually identify each theme in your data, and then use AI to map notes to these categories.

You can add a description to your theme to increase the accuracy with which Marvin’s AI finds relevant notes.

You can also effectively use this feature to categorize new notes that get added to your project.

To view the notes in a theme or sub theme, just click on it. The number alongside the note symbol will tell you how many notes have been mapped to each category.

You can drag and drop themes to rearrange them in any order. Use the pin symbol in the top right corner of any theme to fix its place on the board.

You can also change the color of any theme. Click the selector next to the pin to choose one a preset shade or enter the hex code of any color.

You can easily convert the themes you’ve identified in your affinity board to labels as well. Expand your theme or sub-theme and select “Add as label”. Marvin will add the labels to all the notes mapped under the theme.

Marvin automatically creates a Visualize view of all the data on your affinity board. You can use this to spot patterns and see the connections between each theme and sub-theme.

Select "Visualize view" from the toolbar at the top of the board to view each theme as a bubble. The size of the bubble is directly linked to the number of notes you've added to it. This way, you can tell at a glance which themes are more prevalent in your notes.

Marvin will distinguidh themes that have sub-themes with smaller bubbles inside the larger one. Click any bubble to view the sub-themes in it. You can click through to as many levels of sub-themes you've added.

In the panel on the right, you'll see the notes in each theme/sub-theme. Use this to select all notes, add a theme as a label, or find more notes with AI.

You can drag and drop notes unassigned or assigned notes into different themes/sub-themes as you explore your affinity board. However, you cannot create new themes from the Visualize view. Head back over to the Tree view to add new themes to your board.

After you’ve sorted the notes in a project, you can add and publish them to an Insight to make you research accessible to more members of your team.