The Design of Everyday Things
- Affordance- a relationship between the subject and the object in which an interaction is possible, such as a hammer affording ‘lift’ to Thor, despite this affordance not present to others, to which the hammer may afford ‘look in awe’
- To be effective, affordances and anti-affordances have to be discoverable, perceivable
- Signifiers indicate affordances or anti-affordances that are not otherwise perceivable
- “Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both.”
- Natural mapping - spatial analogies ie swipe up to move up- differs by culture due to interpretation of signifiers
- Groupings and proximity are important principles from Gestalt psychology that can be used to map controls to function: related controls should be grouped together
- “The holes are both affordances—they allow the fingers to be inserted—and signifiers—they indicate where the fingers are to go. The sizes of the holes provide constraints to limit the possible fingers: a big hole suggests several fingers; a small hole, only one. The mapping between holes and fingers—the set of possible operations—is signified and constrained by the holes” —the operating parts of the scissors are clear, the conceptual model is simple