Links and Affordance within a Design
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
When you approach a door, the available door handle that allows you to pass through usually has an affordance that tells the user this is a tool that turns, switches or presses forward (depending on the door). How do you cope when you approach a set of glass doors where only certain sections open and close and there are no obvious signals or markers that afford entry? You get confused, right? We use doors every day of all shapes and sizes but they’re not all the same. And most doors work perfectly well because they have the affordance to us of being a door. They look like a door and act like a door.
On the other hand our electronic dishwasher, video player or mobile phone generally lack a lot of the affordance they should have. We complain about them constantly - manuals written in Korean are testament to the issue. Please don’t deny there’s a problem with the 1001 inventive interfaces to programming a television.
Web design requires the same attention to affordance. Something that’s a link needs to have the affordance of a link, for example. Cool is alright but if you went to work tomorrow and designed a cool door for your office which lacked affordance you might get some complaints - suddenly you have an office that’s got usability and accessibility issues! People can’t find the way in to see you and those who find the handle try to turn it when the knob needs pulling towards them. For no apparent reason they find themselves locked out of your office. While, of course, it works perfectly well for you because you know the secret behind that lack of affordance. This is the crux of usability and accessibility in real world web design.
