The Low Hanging Fruit of Affordance
I’ve been working on a web app that had no design resource on it for 4 months. A third of a year of developer-driven UI, UX and interaction decisions. There was tons of functionality there, and kudos to the dev team for it, but it was a good ways off from usable. But that’s understandable - the team working on it were full-on developers, not design resources.
The state of the app reminded me of the treehouse that Phil Dunphy built in an episode of Modern Family - while still technically a treehouse, someone that cares about the foundation and utility would be hard pressed to call it one.
There was plenty to enhance and correct, as well as entire rewrites of features from the ground up. Funny though, I’m never met with any opposition about these large changes. The interesting questions I get usually come from small changes make around existing controls.
Dev: We see you put a new button to create a new instance that sits globally at the top of the app.
Me: Yep.
Dev : We should probably take it off the page it’s on now.
Me: Que?
Dev : Well, does it really need to be in two places?
The connection lost here was the simple power of affordance.
The question was about where it was implemented and not why. Okay - sooooo, why? Simple: it makes the user feel in control. Why should a user have to click through a few screens when they could initialize the primary action of the app at will? Why make me remember where to go to use the app, when I could use it from wherever I want?
Rule.fm does this extremely well. Naturally, there is a contextual “create new” button for each of their application sections. There is also a universal actions dropdown in the top right that let’s users perform many actions from any part of the app they are in. Additionally, most screens contain the same call-to-action in the empty state in an even more apparent manner. Awesome job, Rule.
The beautiful thing is that most of these types of affordance decisions are low cost and high value. Global interactions, leading with accent colors, progressive disclosure and a myriad of other small choices all are easy to implement and have a wonderful result: they keep users from having to think. And that is one less email in the support queue or FAQ to write. Blammo.
