Follow-up on Clayton Christensen interview

I posted a few days ago about an excellent interview of Clayton Christensen at the Gartner Group website. In that interview Christensen recommends a particular methodology, called KJ-diagramming, to assist in market segementation. I was not familiar with KJ-diagramming so I went to the internet to get some answers.

What I found is that KJ-diagramming (or the KJ-method, or KJ-technique) is one of the core Japanese quality movement techniques. The technique is also widely know as Affinity Diagramming. It's very straightforward and can be used to address many types of problems. I found references related to strategic planning (which is probably closest to what Christensen discusses in the interview), usability design/user interface design (seems to be widely adopted in this area), information design/information architecture, other types of design problems, etc.

Here are links to some of the resources I found. Most of these provide a summary or overview of the method.

Probably the best overall article I found about the technique was this article by Jared Spool. Jared is a well-known expert in the area of usability design, esp. for software systems. His article is seven pages long and provides both a good, high-level overview of the technique as well as a little more meat for those who actually want to use the technique.

Three others shorter overviews of the technique are here, here, and here. All have a short overview of the technique. The first of these links has an interesting photo of the results of using the technique that you might find interesting.