Click me! Click what?

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…