In Norman, D’s “The design of everyday things(1998)”, the definition of affordance became clearer through the introduction that delivered in chapter one and chapter four. While chapter one is focusing more on the mental reason of why people tend to use service with more affordance, chapter four put more attention to explain how should designers/service providers do to approach these growing demands from the consumers.
Think about this: How much tolerance your users had to pay on your products?
If they paid less effort on figuring out how to use your product, it is good; otherwise, unless your service is irreplaceable(which is unlikely to happen in these days), the users will gradually leaving the service you provide and move to other suppliers.
To be simple with affordance, when the product is designed as ” the users can know the way of using it naturally”, the product holds affordance. Norman states “Conceptual models are critical to good design”, and there’s mainly three of them he pointed out: feedback, constraints, and affordances.
First, about “feedback”. At this point, suddenly I realized that during 3 weeks of reading, there’s some kind of subtle cognition built about the “networked media”: the technology/methodology/philosophy of media in our age is all about connecting with people(“the users”, specifically.)–the users can actually contribute to the service they got by their feedback, the consumer and supplier collaborating base on the age of networked media.
Second, about the constraints. There are bad designers, but the design they came up with couldn’t be outrageous. Some of the designs must come based on common sense, if the common sense just cannot apply to it, we considered as the design was failed, and the annoying redundancies appears: warnings and instruction signs. That kind of ruined the oneness of material design itself, which is highlighted to be avoided in the design process.
Third, the affordance, which to me is something that combined the ideas of previous 2 conceptual models hence evolved, to a concept that has more generality that including more complex dimensions of aspects that how can good design be like.
We saw the real-life examples of how affordance permeated into our lives. For example, see the display stand just outside our tutorial classroom:
It is bright-colored, the upper surface is shaped just like an opened book. Everyone would figure out how do they suppose to use this stand with exactly the purpose it had been designed for–display books or brochure. The slope on its surface won’t let the users think about putting a cup of coffee on it, the size of each sloped surfaces were equal, a bit larger than A4, which could be the biggest normal size you could get for a brochure. And the most beautiful part of this design is that users don’t need to think these much(as I do previously), just naturally get how it is supposed to work.
However, when we move away from the reading itself, go a step further–think about the word affordance–is it abused by us in current days?
I had looked up for affordance online, trying to see what else I can get from outside the readings provided by the course, and something draws my attention. Norman once stated that “DOET introduced the concept of ‘perceived affordances’ to the design community, and to my pleasure, the concept has become immensely popular.”, and the problem now is, this concept became too popular.
People simply blame the bad design with “Oh this design is crappy due to the lack of affordance”–which come back to the idea of one of the conceptual models of design: feedback. The word “affordance” has gained substantial contents during the evolving of its lexical meaning, which could thanks to the growing demands of consumers(they just keep asking for more and more convenience). This enriched meaning make the word “affordance” too large, too generalized that when the user actually blame some service is “lack of affordance”, the feedback is not that valuable.
Reference:
Norman, D 1998, The design of everyday things , Basic Book, New York