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…

Affordances

A debate is/was going on the proper use of affordances. Often it has been misused, and some claim, because of that, affordance needs to be redefined/refined. This essay argues that affordance as a defenition is not at all ill-defined, but people should simply stop misusing it: Cognitive affordances are a misnomer.In 1999 Norman wrote an article pleading for a more deliberate use of the term 'affordance'. According to him this term has often been misused in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) literature and discussions. Especially when considering the typical Graphical User Interface (GUI) interaction using keyboard, mouse and screen. He would regret it when the term affordances was to be dropped for being too ill defined. Several years later, Hartson (2003), in agreement with Normans plead, replies to Norman proposing four types of affordances. In this commentary I will first introduce Hartson's (2003) proposal, compare it with the use of the term afforda…