Click me! Click what? Why 'no-button' iOS isn't about loosing the 'affordance' of clickability.

Well, iOS has gone flat. We’ve, as interaction designers/human-computer interaction-specialists, traditionally been taught that a button should look like a button. And as we heralded Apple for its great interaction design some tend to be a bit sceptic / pissed.

The idea that something you could click on should look like a button comes from the idea of affordances; a button should expose the affordance of click-ability (or tap-ability if you like). More or less like a chair exposes the affordance of sit-ability, like a lying tree trunk does.

Affordance is a concept introduced in human-computer interaction by Don Norman in the late eighties who derived it from James Gibson. Don Norman’s original reading on the concept has been popularized quite a lot, whereas James Gibson’s work hasn’t (at least not in interaction design-schools). But Gibson’s idea of affordance was quite different from Don Norman’s simplification. Later Don Norman revised his original concept of affordance in computer interfaces and relabelled it ‘cognitive affordance’. In an article I wrote about 7 years ago on affordances (much more in depth on this discussion and with references) I already tried to explain why this is still a misnomer:

‘Cognitive affordance’ however, seems like a contradictio in terminis. The concept of affordances is based around a direct link between perception and action, bypassing conscious processing, while cognitive affordances demand conscious processing.

Now I even take a stronger stance in the matter and I’d argue that an interface ‘button’ really is nothing but a metaphor. A metaphor can help, but it can also limit the possibilities of the user interface seriously. And that was the major problem of the emulating-real-world-object-design of previous iOS-versions.

Now Apple has created a new(er) slate on which an interaction paradigm can developed that allows for better exploiting the full potential of a multi-touch screen. Like a fully zooming interface for instance, which the animations seem to be hinting at. But who knows. Progress is still slowly at Apple, but I believe iOS 7 is good move forward.

So that’s why the no-button-iOS isn’t about loosing the affordance of click-ability. There really wasn’t a click/tap-affordance in the first place. Most of what is currently virtual is learned behaviour in the first place. We should better worry about creating the best experiences for our end-users.