Affordances, I actually found this really interesting. I’d never come across this term prior to this week and I liked that it made sense to me.
When we were in the tutorial discussing affordances in more detail and in particular, in relation to Instagram – suddenly a whole lot of things made sense. When we were talking about how link sharing is not that easy on Instagram as they want people to stay on the app and not have the traffic leave and go onto another website, I remember thinking huh yeah that does make sense. I was conscious that if you ever clicked on another link in Instagram it would bring that link up in the app but I never really thought about it enough to understand why they would do that. They’ve obviously designed it like that to make money and also make it this privilege for influencers to share links. This then led me to think of Donald Norman’s concept, DOET. Before learning about what this was and affordances, I would never have given the link sharing much thought but now I do find myself critiquing the design of Instagram.
This quote by Norman “When we first see an object we have never seen before, how do we know how to
use it?” prompted me to think about just that, well how do we know how to use it? There has to be feedback, the design must explain itself, there has to be an “act of communication between the designer and user”, affordances, constraints and also observation. It made me think of the kettle on the front page of the reading, well how would someone who had never seen a kettle before know that it usually is not designed like that. And it’s because of the constraints surrounding the product that you would work out that you can’t use it with the handle. The semantic constraint literally being that you can’t pour the kettle with the handle without it spilling. The constraints inform you on how to use the object.
Instagram quite literally does allow me to post what I want people to see. It affords me to show the kind of content that I want people to see. When Norman talks about “the power of observation” I think that is one of the many things that really influence how I use Instagram and what I let people see.
