What is an affordance?

Understanding what affordances are and how they help map people’s mental models to a product is key to good design. But if you are like a lot of my students, the concept of an affordance is easier said than done to understand.

First, I would recommend you read chapter 1 of Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things. He does a very good job of detailing what an affordance is, but even after I assign this reading and go over it…