Video Ezy and Rental Interface Affordances
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
Interfaces are everywhere, more common in the world around us than we often acknowledge. We interface with our fridge, our television, our car and probably our toilet. It’s the point where our physical lives touch underlying technologies. We interface with a book through the technologies of language and writing. We interface with our computer through a keyboard or mouse. We interface with businesses through their point of sale. We interface with the world through our senses of touch, taste, hearing, sight and smell. The world is a mesh of interfaces – sparking sciences of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and studies in areas such as usability, ergomics, and cognitive psychology.
A key part of how we interface with the world has to do with a concept called affordances – does it look like what it does, like you’d expect from a doorknob or an elevator button? This is a major factor why some of the items you purchase are psychotically difficult to use. But onto my example:
Last week I went into Video Ezy to rent a couple of new release videos and they have changed their system. The old system has the shiny DVD cases on display and when one is taken there is an orange holder DVD case that doesn’t represent an available video. In simple terms, there is an instant affordance of the availability of videos for the customer as they traverse the shelves. It’s obvious. And it’s also a system that worked rather well from a customer perspective as an established behaviour.
