7. People See Cues that Tell Them What to Do With an Object

In the real world, objects communicate to you about how you can, and should, interact with them:  doorknobs invite you to grab and turn them, the handle on a coffee mug tells you to curl a few fingers through it and lift it up; a pair of scissors invites you to put fingers through the circles.   If the item, like the door handle, gives you cues that don’t work, you get annoyed and frustrated. These cues are called affordances.    

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James Gibson wrote about the idea of affordance in 1979. He described affordances as action possibilities in the environment. In 1988 Don Norman modified the idea of affordances in his book The Design of Everyday Things. He referred to the idea of perceived affordances: if you want people to take action on an object, whether in real life or on a computer screen, you need to make sure that they can easily perceive, figure out, and interpret what the object is and what they can and should do with it.  

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Caption: : https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/affordances-and-design

When you’re designing an application or Web site, think about the affordances of objects on the screen. For example, have you ever wondered what makes people want to click on a button? Cues in the button’s shadow tell people that it can be pushed in, the way a button on an actual device can be pushed in.  

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Most people have figured out the affordance cue that blue, underlined text means that the text is hyperlinked, and if you click on it you will go to a different page. But lately, many hyperlinks are more subtle, with the only cue that they are clickable showing up when you hover. And if you are reading on your iPad, all of these cues are missing. You can’t hover with your finger on an iPad. By the time you’ve touched the screen with your finger, you’ve clicked on the link.  

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