Affordance is a term coin and first us by psychologist JJ Gibson in the 1970s. He defin it as the relationship between the environment and the actor. Today, affordance is spreading beyond the boundaries of behavioral and cognitive psychology, also into the design of digital interfaces. When you understand what affordance is, you will be able to better understand product and interface design, and you will gradually become a much better designer.
What is affordance?
A situation where the sensory characteristics of an object intuitively imply its functionality and use. Crowdcube
Crowdcube’s layman’s definition is perfect. All objects around us have affordances, some more obvious than russia phone number data others. An affordance is the ability to take some action with an object; it is not a property of the object itself. In other words, the button can be press; the ability to press the button is its affordance.
The original definition, first us by JJ Gibson, describ all the possible physical actions you can perform on an object. Over time, the definition has shift. Now the definition is the price also has a number of variables: broader and includes the so-call discoverability (discoverability) of actions. This change was caus by the technological revolution of digital interfaces. Discoverability is an interesting concept in the digital realm because if you use a computer, you discover possible actions through instructions given within the interface itself.
Physical objects
Let’s take a step back to the physical world where we see objects with properties such as size, shape or weight. These provide hints as to what can be done with such objects. Let us give two classic examples. Let’s start with a teacup; it is small and has a lug that allows the cup to be gripp. It also has a bowl shape which indicates that something may have been pour into it. If there is tea in it, the cg leads affordance is that you can grasp the cup and drink the tea. Another example is a toothbrush: it has a long but thin handle that allows you to grip it firmly, and so on.