A Review of Affordances and Affordance-Based Design to Address Usability

Abstract

Maier and Fadel pioneered Affordance-Based Design (ABD) based on Gibson's revolutionary theory of affordances and Norman's deployment of the concept in his book, “The Design of Everyday Things”. Gibson (1979) introduced the affordance concept into the discipline of Ecological Psychology to address the interactions between an object and an agent. The Ecological approach includes the direct perception of affordances for the user along with a consideration of the users’ biomechanics. However, as the concept of affordance was imported and utilized in different disciplines, including engineering design, some important aspects of Ecological theory were omitted.This paper is an attempt to review the definitions and different utilizations of the affordance concept focusing on the design of usable products to identify the different views and the missing elements. After addressing the divergent viewpoints of affordances, we provide recommendations to improve the usability aspects in ABD by considering direct perception and ergonomics. We claim that a design (based on affordances) that fails to address both criteria may result in a product that is less usable.

An Eye-Tracking Supported Investigation Into the Role of Forms of Representation on Design Evaluations and Affordances of Original Product Features

“…The study of affordances is diffused among those that require design evaluators. The concept of affordances in design was particularly popularized by Norman (1999) and Maier and Fadel (2009), which was followed by considerable debate especially on a theoretical level (Masoudi et al, 2019) a thorough review of the topic is out of the scope of the present paper. In general, a strict vision on the affordance concept links it to the actions carried out by users on a product or system in order for it to perform certain functions.…”

Feature Design Assessment of the Ship Fire Alarm System

“…A Human-Machine Interface (HMI) is a user interface or dashboard that links a person to a machine, system, or device and can be used to visually display data, track production time, trends, and tags and Monitor machine i/o in the industries of energy, oil, and gas, manufacturing, power, and transportation, etc. According to the eory of Affordances, people see the environment not only in terms of object shapes and particular relationships but also in terms of object action possibilities (affordances)-seeing a thing implies seeing the action connected with it [26]. Under the framework of the eory of Affordances, assume that the degree of affordance of an object is associated with the information it provides.…”

Spatial Perception of 3D CAD Model Dimensions and Affordances in Virtual Environments

“…Brown and Blessing [53] suggest the usage of affordances as a supplementary perspective to functional reasoning in the design process. A product should fit the physical characteristics of a user, but possible actions that can be performed on or with it should also be perceptible with a minimal cognitive effort [4].…”

“…By their definition, affordances depend on the relationship between the environment and the user (as discussed in section II-C). Nevertheless, there is some ambiguity in the literature on whether affordances are perceived directly or spatial properties (such as dimensions of the environment and the anthropometric measures of the user) have to be firstly perceived in extrinsic units and then compared employing cognitive processes to enable perception of affordances [4], [22]. The conducted experiment does not resolve this ambiguity.…”

“…Aside from human factors such as physical characteristics, perception of possible actions that users can perform on and with a product (i.e. affordances) [2,3] should be considered when designing for usability [4]. These elements should be considered from the very beginning of the development project and checked as a constitutive part of design reviews since efforts to implement changes in early phases of product development require significantly lower resources than in later ones [1], [5].…”