Week 4 | Affordance

What is affordance?

An affordance is the design aspect of an object that suggests how the object should be used when the time we see it. Basically, affordance is the perspective view and the combination of experience of the users on seeing and using the object based on its design without a description on how to use it. For example a stapler. When we see it, we know how to use it immediately because of the good affordance aspects. Even though there were lots of stapler's designs but yet the experience of using it make it affordance and people still know how to use it to combining papers together even the shapes are not like staplers anymore.

staplers

We know that chair is made for us to sit, toothbrush is made for us to brushes our teeth and many more things in the world that actually relate to affordances. In technology, affordance is important on how people will be interacting with the technology. For example, a computer or a laptop keyboard. Yes laptops do have a lot different brand like Dell, HP and Acer but they still have the way to use it and we know how to use it because the keyboard have the same letter arrangements all the time and we have already knew that based on our experinceand we are familiar to it and we knew we can use the letter button to make words and that is called an affordance. Some other technologies that need affordance is hand-phone and calculator.

Why we need affordances in design?

This is because it helps the users on how to use the product and to not make the users frustrated when they were confused on how to use the product. "When the product can explain itself, it has a good affordance." 

AZANISA
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