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Norman on Affordances

August 15, 2002

Don Norman, author of “The Design of Everyday Things”, “Things That Make Us Smart”, and other books clarifies affordances:

It is clear that we need some word to describe the things we add to designs to make controls perceptible. Hence, we add ridges, depressions, different textures, labels, and lines. We have invented conventions in interface design, such as drawings of buttons, underlines, colors to indicate unvisited and visited items, and scroll bars. Lines that demarcate areas to be clicked.

There is no word to describe this: Affordances is technically inappropriate, but very closely related to the intended concept. And so, the meaning of affordances has transformed itself.

"I put an affordance in the interface," says the visual designer, meaning that a box was drawn around a clickable region. Now, technically, in the original sense of affordance, that is wrong. The region was always clickable. The box is a "sign" that this is the appropriate region. The semiotic community understands the distinction. But, alas, the average designer knows even less about semiotics than about linguistic origins.

Source: CHI-WEB archives — August 2002, week 3 (#8)

Posted August 15, 2002 10:22 PM