Affordances, signifiers & good food experiences
Ask any designer for their industry bible and they’ll reach for a copy of The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman, the godfather of modern UX. Norman brought together the many disparate principles of user-centred product design to shine a light on the thinking behind some the most beautifully functional products that we take for granted from cooking stoves to the fascinating complexities of door handles (no, I’m not being sarcastic). He outlines six psychological concepts that go into a well-designed system: affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, feedback and the conceptual model. Here, we’ll look at affordances and signifiers, and how they should be considered to enhance the way we experience food.
Affordances
Norman defines an affordance as “a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used”. It’s not just about the set of listed features that an object has, but what the specific individual using the object can do with it.
For example, to a restaurant diner who is a proficient chopstick user, chopsticks have an affordance as a versatile eating utensil, but to a novice who steps into a Japanese restaurant for the very first time, these two wooden sticks hold no such affordance, they cannot use them as an eating utensil.
Flipping this idea, let’s look at the famous London restaurant Dans Le Noir, where they play with affordances dependant upon sight. Diners experience their meal in complete darkness, the idea being that they taste the life of a blind person. By removing the sense of sight, diners no longer have the affordance judge a dish based on how it looks. At any other restaurant, a waiter showing you to your table simply guides you there, whilst at Dans Le Noir, you are wholly reliant upon your waiter, literally being handheld to your table. The waiter now providers diners with the affordance to avoid knocking into other tables, to safely sit down and in many cases as a calming agent for diners who may fear the dark more than they originally thought. For diners with full vision, eating in the dark affords a unique and exciting experience, that can be shared with a friend or loved one, but for a blind diner, it’s just another meal. Insufficient consideration of affordances can spell doom for the customer experience but carefully adjusting them can bring your customers an entirely different experience, that they will then rave about to every person they meet (or even feature in a popular rom-com).
Signifiers
Whilst affordances establish what a user can do with a system or object, signifiers communicate where the action should take place.
Imagine you’re at a street food market, queuing up for a delicious Vietnamese banh mi sandwich. You give your order for the roasted pork banh mi, with extra daikon and no cilantro (because you’re a heathen), but the woman behind you orders the exact same, so do the next three people. You pay by card, say you don’t need a receipt and go stand with other waiting customers at the far end of the food truck. One sandwich is ready, so the food truck owner calls out for a roasted pork banh mi, with extra daikon and no cilantro, but none of the people in the queue who came after you know that you all ordered the same, so you all come forwards to collect your order. Also, no one remembers who was in the queue in front or behind them more than two people away, utter confusion ensues. What’s missing here? A signifier. In this case, the signifier to communicate the affordance of priority and who this sandwich belongs to. In a usual scenario, the signifier could be an order number, given to each customer when they place their order and called out when it’s ready.
The fluidity of the paying experience can have a larger impact than you think about how a customer views their whole dining experience at your restaurant. Many times, I’ve enjoyed a delicious meal and then come to pay, more than happy to give a significant tip to the waiter for the excellent service. The waiter holds the card machine out, I ask if they take American Express and they then either tell me that they don’t or worse, that they don’t know and I could just try to see if it works. In the latter case, I tap, swipe or insert my card (sometimes all three if the other two don’t work), the waiter might announce out-loud that my card has been declined and ask if I have another card to use. Of course, I easily pay with another card and the waiter smiles, bidding our table a farewell and thanks us for the visit. At this point, I’ve been left with a bad taste in my mouth, initially unsure and confused as I tap, swipe and then try to insert by American Express card. Then, I’m momentarily embarrassed in front of my friends when told that my card was “declined”, having to rummage around for another card (as if I were broke) and paying on a card that I did not expect to — perhaps I had intended to use the money on that card for something else, now my whole cashflow system is out of whack. I will probably leave that restaurant, somewhat regretting the tip that I committed to giving and unlikely to come back.
If the restaurant had made effective use of signifiers, placing a small sticker with accepted card vendors on the card machine itself, or at the back of the menu, or back-of-house so that all waiters were aware, the emotional rollercoaster that left me embarrassed and leaving unsatisfied could have been avoided. I could have left your restaurant and raved to work colleagues about your food, how I’d never tried anything like it before and that they really must go.
Have the focus be where we want it, on the creativity
All the culinary creativity in the world won’t save a customer who has been let down by logistics and who’s edge-case was not considered when designing the restaurant experience.
Affordances and signifiers should be used to set a baseline for the diner’s experience to avoid dissatisfaction but they can also be leveraged and built on top of the baseline to show off the chef’s creativity, draw attention to the things that make the restaurant unique and even create a unique offering by manipulating affordances and signifiers with intention. It could be the difference between a short-lived restaurant with a great chef or a neighbourhood institution that stands the test of time and builds a community of life-long fans.
