Understanding affordances in UI design

Affordances are the properties of an object that help a user understand that they can interact with it, and the type of interaction that may be involved. Designing user experiences with affordance in mind is crucial in order to ensure a user understands what they can do across sections of a product or app.

Affordance applies to objects in both the physical and digital world, and as we have seen the world of product design advance over the past several years, designing effective affordances has become increasingly more challenging through increased use of gestures and implied interactions. We continuously need to become more innovative in terms of signposting and messaging interactions to a user, and this is where the real challenge of understanding and implementing effective affordances lies.

In his book ‘The Design of Everyday Things’, Don Norman describes the term affordance as “the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used.”

Norman also goes on to explain that while “affordances make sense for interaction with physical objects, they are confusing when dealing with virtual ones.” It is the additional concept of signifiers that help people discover the possibilities of what can be done.