Affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action.It is believe that a broader view of affordances is needed which encompasses social and cultural aspects of our everyday life.
Points given by the lecturer’s slide are as below
- · Doors are for …………
- · Door knobs are for ……….
- · Windows are for …………..
The term affordance can also refer to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking without any picture, label, or instruction.
A forcing function is a constraint where the user "is forced" to complete a task based on a limited, paired down set of features or controls.
Forcing functions help streamline, simplify or minimize how a user interacts with a design. Designers benefit from this interaction design technique by reducing navigation redundancy, task effort and the complexity.
When should it be used?
When you want to:
- Constrain a user interaction
- Speed up or re-direct a task
- Limit an interaction
- Eliminate confusion
- Simplify a design
- Protect users from danger or hazards
One person's affordance is another's 'mess' (mindmaps) or one person's affordance (lists) is another person's uninformative and inflexible limit. Affordances are more than opportunities, they create new niches in the social ecology, which add opportunities and constraints, sometimes in surprising ways. Each new process and tool in a particular area of social interaction potentially interacts with, builds on, or displaces, the affordances which have been developed 'around' previous processes and tools.
“Customers are always king” mentioned by the lecturer which in meaning to the quotation is that customers are the ones to be satisfied and without the ‘kings’ the designer’s interlace can’t work.
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