Week 4- Affordance quality

Affordance, quality of that contained by the object or even the environment that allow people to perform certain action. In other word, it is a visual clue of the object to fulfill it function. People will what they need to react without thinking for so long with the affordance quality of the object.

The most common example in our diary life is the visual sign board that used for the traffic purpose. Traffic user like us can easily understand the function of specific sign board without thinking. This term is frequently used in the Human-Computer interaction (HCI) study.

This term was first introduce by psychologist, James J. Gilbson at 1977 in article "The Theory of Affordances". Affordance is defined as all "action possibilities" that contain by the environment by James J. Gilbson. The action that induced by the afforfance quality is totally independent of individual's ability to recognize them. Individual fail to recognize this qualities will fail to perform certain actoin and it mean the affordance quality of the object or environment is weak. Affordance need to be improve by time, change from bad to better so that the object and environment can successfully induced individual to perform the action.

Source of infomation: wikipedia.org

dictionary.reference.com

Week 4 - Affordance by Eyok

Affordance- (explain in Chinese for me to understand more well)

功能可见性；自解释性；给养

功能可见性 示能性 启示

For me, Affordance is mean the function, the physical function of a certain object or environment.

In Wikipedia, they explain that an Affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action.

Example:

The shape of door knob. It will make u go to turn it by just looking it, although there are no instruction, no labels.

the hand shape make you want to shake hand with it.

Affordances in GUI's

-Important concept.

-Button drawn as 3D shapes appear to "stick out" and afford pushing.

-Sliders and scroll bars afford dragging.

"Design for good affordances"

Affordance: how an object communicates the way it is used

You will know how to use by just seeing the layout :)

Affordance:

-An affordance is a quality of an onject, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action.

meanwhile;

Perceived affordance:

-refers to the perceived properties of the object that suggest how you / the user could use it.

Elements of Perceived affordance:

-Context-where

-Culture-society

-Instinct-unconcious

-Mental Models-expectations

such as: How to apply it= Clicking an object (mouse)

Why have affordances in Design?

-Designing with Intent - designing specific affordances and constraints to guide users.

-Guilding Users = shaping perceptions of what actions are possible and making some actions intentionally more difficult / impossible

-The same is applied to Product Design.

Summary:

1. All design is persuasive.

2. Profitable to the client = profitable to the user

3. Persuasive technology is about persuading, although their aim is to make money.

4. The world very need persuasive technology.

5. Study affordance in Interaction Studies, is to understand what we can provide to fullfilling user's need.

reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and_design.html