Affordances in Design
Daily we come across multiple different products spread across different dimensions of our day to day life. Many of them are physical products while others are in the form of digital applications or services.
We often find some products or services quite user-friendly and easy to use compared to others, this is mainly because the designers have spent a good amount of time focusing on the principles of designs such as Affordance while designing them
What is Affordance?
The easiest way to describe affordance is the ability of any product or service to give a clue to the end-user on how to use it or how to interact with it mainly by its design elements and properties.
Affordance helps the user understand the usability of the product based on the past experiences he/she may have.
Let us take the examples of the product we often interact with.
- Pencil: So the affordance offered by the pencil is to write
- Key: The affordance offered by the key is to open the lock
Types of affordances.
1. Perceivable Affordances.
Those designs of products that signify their use upfront like in all the above three examples.
2. Hidden Affordances.
Here the affordance is present but is not directly visible or made available to the end-user.
For Eg: A glass can be used to drink water or beverage but it can also be used as a container to hold pencils, pens, etc.
Why Affordance is important while designing?
Affordance though a very easy to understand the principle is often not considered while designing many products which ultimately make the end-user frustrated and confused on how to use the product.
USB Port
Often I find people struggling while using a normal USB port, they struggle once or twice to find out the exact direction in which the USB cable needs to be inserted.
Apple Pencil
Although a Good Affordance always leads to a user-friendly product, the best example that can be taken of the Apple Pencil is designed to look similar to the normal pencil having a tip at the bottom. This design would help the user to easily understand the use of the product based on his or her experience with the normal pencil.
When an object has strong affordances, it’s very clear how to use it. One of the Gurus of our design industry Don Norman has explained this in a very amazing/fun manner by taking the example of a simple thing we interact with every day “Doors”.
“Google Norman-Doors”, see what you would find.
