The Evolution of Digital Affordances
Moving out of the caves
The user interface is a cultural relic that helps define a generation of social, mobile, global, and hyper-local digital users. The user interface is in its beginning stages and has the potential to evolve into a universal language.
The user interface is as much a communication tool as it is an interactive display. The interface communicates its interactivity through understandable cues. These cues are called affordances.
Psychologist James J. Gibson coined the word “affordance” to describe the “actionable possibilities” in an environment. Don Norman later popularized the term in his book, The Design of Everyday Things.
An affordance is a readily perceivable interaction possibility. It occurs when an object, whether physical or digital, has sensory characteristics that intuitively implies its functionality and use. For example, a handle on a coffee cup affords picking up, just as Amazon’s “add to cart” button provides a cue for initiating a buying experience.
Unlike physical products, digital affordances can manifest themselves in any way imaginable.
Affordances evolved with the user’s knowledge of digital cues. In the beginning of user interface design, most digital affordances resembled things in the physical world. The folder icon suggested storing files, and the trash icon suggested deleting, etc. This skeuomorphic approach changed as users became savvier.
Affordances in the physical world stretch as far as reality permits. If a designer replaces a coffee cup handle with a white dot, the user would no longer be able to pick it up. However, the digital world can be re-written in any conceivable way.
The pinch and zoom interaction on a mobile map is not inherently intuitive. Users learn it once, perhaps by accident, luck, or word of mouth, and it ingrains in their mind. This type of interaction is discoverable because it builds upon the expectation that a user can zoom in on a digital map.
Designers employ affordances from what users already understand. This appropriation can be done beautifully and minimally by building upon established design patterns. A button doesn’t have to look like a real-world button with drop shadows and bevels. It only needs a cue to explains its interactivity.
Digital technology will always outpace mainstream society’s understanding of it. The goal of design is to make technology palatable. Early humans drew symbols on cave walls to help explain a complex and dangerous world. These symbols developed into hieroglyphs and later into modern alphabets.
A visual vernacular creates itself through user interaction symbols in a similar manner to how alphabets developed from pictographs. It will be interesting to see if a universal interaction language develops in the same way as our modern alphabets.
