Understanding Affordances
I’m pretty sure all of you listening out there have used a keyboard to type on, at some point in your life. Now tell me something — when you first looked at a generic keyboard, what is it you felt could be done with it?
Since we’re talking of a generic keyboard, and not one of those fancy mechanical ones with removable key caps or even removable switches, the answer is pretty clear — you can use your fingers, or any body part for that matter, to press down on the keys, right?
This is because you can deduce from the flat tops of the keycaps, that you are probably meant to press down on them. And when you tried it out for the first time, that was indeed the case.
The exact same principle carries on with the example of doors — how many times have you tried to pull open a door meant to be pushed, and pushed with all your might, only to find it needed to be pulled? Well, you’re not alone, and it is not your fault.
It’s the design that’s faulty here.
In this piece, we’ll be learning the basics of affordances — what they are, why leverage their tremendous power, and how to use them in your design.
So what is an affordance? The basic definition of affordances, is the physical characteristics of an object, that influence its function and use. In simple terms, when you see a chair, what comes to your mind is — it’s meant to be sat on, when you see a glass Coca Cola bottle, what comes to your mind is — it’s meant for you to drink from.
You don’t see a chair and want to pour water onto the seat and drink from it. Nor, would you want to sit on an upright coca cola bottle — No, You Really Don’t!
As it turns out, the physical form of an object makes it well suited for some functions than others — like wheels — they are meant to allow rolling. So we can say that wheels, positively afford rolling, and negatively afford being stationary.
Similarly, the physical form of an object makes it more appropriate for some interactions than others — like the keycaps on keyboards, like the chair, like the Coca Cola bottle, like buttons inside an elevator.
But why are these affordances, apparently so important?
Well, for one thing, when affordances are good, the objects appear to be very intuitive, and perform very efficiently. But, when affordances are bad — the objects are hard to use, and seem to perform very poorly.
Lets come back now to the example of push and pull doors. This example Specifically, is called the example of Norman doors — after Donald Norman — who coined the term “affordance”. Let’s say you’re walking towards a door — and you see a handle on it. The obvious human reaction would be to hold the handle and pull towards you — after all handles are meant to be pulled upon — say in buses and trains and roller-coaster rides — you are almost programmed to pull a handle. But in this case, the door was designed to use that handle and push it open. This is a bad affordance. Because, if you indeed needed to push the door, you could have placed your palm anywhere on the door and pushed it open — much more easily than through the handle.
Hence, the correct design for doors that are meant to be pulled open — is to have a handle. And the correct design for push-open doors — is to have a simple rectangular metal plate, flush with the surface of the door — affording you to place your palm, or a few fingers on the plate, and push it open.
This way, you will never need a push or pull sign on top of the handle or the plate — it will be obvious within the design itself, and there will be no mental conflict or room for error this way — this is good usage of affordances.
So when you are crafting designs, it is important that your design should positively afford correct use, and negatively afford improper use.
When you apply affordances correctly, it will become so obvious that users will never imagine, that it could be used in any way, other than the right way.
And that is the hallmark of good design.
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