Affordance : an unnoticed aspect in UX design
The term “affordance” was first introduced by the psychologist James Gibson when he researched visual perception. Gibson used this term to describe the actions that people consider possible when interacting with an object, usually based on their perception or knowledge about this object.
All the objects that surround us have affordances. For instance, a button that you use to call an elevator affords you to push it, a chair affords you to sit on it, and a door affords you to open it. Learning the affordances of the environment we live in is an integral part of our socialization.
With the advent of various user interfaces, affordances got a new vector of development. We did hundreds of operations with diverse actions, tools, and things. Now we also do tons of operations just clicking the mouse or tapping the screen. It makes UX designers work on the new ways of presenting affordances that accumulate patterns and knowledge people have from real life in digital interactions. This experience is dramatically different so the approaches change too.
Although there are many types of affordances, let’s understand few such instances:-
Pattern Affordances
Pattern affordances are based on the power of habit and present a huge factor of effective interaction design. Their biggest advantage is saving users’ effort on keeping many things in memory simultaneously. There are many typical affordances of this kind: for example, we are all used to the clickable logos in website headers which usually open a home page. From one interface to the other, we know that underlined piece of copy is usually a clickable link, the information about contacts and privacy policy of the website is often found in a website footer, and three vertical points in the app layout mean “more” showing additional functions.
Negative Affordances
Whatever strange it could sound, negative affordances also play a big role in positive user experience: they root in the fact that negative result is also a result. The purpose of a negative affordance is to give users a prompt that some elements or operations are inactive at the moment.
False Affordances
In a perspective of UX affordances, false and negative shouldn’t be seen as synonyms. No way. False affordance is what designers should avoid: these are the wrong prompts which lead users to the different action or result, not the one which is expected behind the prompt. Sometimes it’s done intentionally, but in most cases by mistake. For example, if the text in the web copy block is underlined, users automatically think it is clickable. So, they can be really annoyed to understand it doesn’t work — it means that they have been prompted the wrong way.
Thank you for reading this article.
Follow me on LinkedIn for more design content! 🙂
