At the beginning of the year I was lucky enough to upgrade from my retro IPhone 8 Plus to the new and improved IPhone 11. There was only one issue… how was I going to adapt to a buttonless iPhone?  for the first few days I tirelessly dragged my thumb across the bottom of my screen forgetting that the task was made redundant by the new face recognition technology. 

Since the beginning of time innovation has caused a common struggle and frustration for people learning how to grasp new technologies and new object functions. In other words, working out the affordances of objects and technologies. Explained during our tutorial we discussed what it means to look at objects or software and determine how we can interact with it and use it.

Image source 

According to Donald Norman an affordance “refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used”(Norman, 1998, pg.9). An example of this can be a book. The pages of a book logically are meant to be read, by turning the pages and using our eyes we can digest the words and make sense of them. This is an action. Books however afford many other things that the book designer may not have necessarily have imagined the book could be used for. For example: using the book as a scratcher or as a shield from the rain.

Image source 

As the prompt for Networked Media relates directly to the platform Instagram, I thought it would be important to highlight the same frustrations people face when interacting with Instagram software. For someone who is not overly educated on social media and technology it can be hard to grasp Instagram’s many functions, thus becoming one of the constraints associated to affordances.

During the tutorial we identified that constraints can be either physical, semantic, cultural or logical.  Looking directly at Instagram, we can determine some of the constraints that users face while on the platform. For example; A person who has little to know knowledge about social media platforms may have trouble interacting with the platform as they don’t know how to use the software. To like photos on instagram you must double tap the image for it to work, this function is unique to Instagram and thus would make it difficult for non-Instagrammers to use.

So how did they fix this?

Instagram understood that the interface of their software had to be easy to use at the same time as being unique. They decided to make alterations in order to help users understand their actions. For users who couldn’t grasp the double tap motion they added a small heart that would appear as a reaction to your double tap- this was done to show confirmation for users that they had made the ‘like’.

Image source 

My example of instagram constraints is comparing my own understanding of Instagram to the way my mother uses the platform. My mother to this day still cant grasp the way the platform works,  countless times she has asked me how to save a photo, how to take a photo and EVEN how to like a photo. It comes down to cultural affordances and logic, I have grown up in the digital native generation where coming across any new software on a platform doesn’t take too long to get the hang of. Personally I find every platform a variation of the  one before. However, my mother didn’t grow up like I have and these things don’t come so easily to her. But you know what I can’t use a VCR.

READING: Core: Norman, D 1998, The design of everyday things , Basic Book, New York (Sections: Preface vii-xv; Chapter one pp 1-13; Chapter 4 (constraints) pp 81-87; (computers) pp 177-186).