What are Affordances in UX Design?

What is an Affordance?

Affordances in UX design are properties of an element in a UI design that suggest/indicate how a user should interact with it. In simple words, they can be seen as visual cues that indicate the usage/interaction of an element in a design. One of the examples can be buttons. Buttons in an interface resemble real-life buttons and afford pushing actions.

Thus affordances help a user to know how to use an element or object in an interface. Affordances are an integral part of UX design and are widely used in every design. They avoid the need of explicit instructions on how to interact and enhance the overall user experience.

Types of Affordances

Let us get a basic understanding of some types of affordances in UX designs.

Visual Affordances:

• Visual affordances use actual visual properties like color , placement, or size to suggest how the element/object is to be used. This maybe also used with some explicit instructions of tags to enhance the user’s understanding.
  For ex. On the login prompt on the official site of GeeksForGeeks asks user to Sign In, this button provides a visual cue using a bright green and slightly 3D appearance to it. Along with that an actual tag of Sign In is used.

Hidden Affordances:

• The hidden affordances come into play when a user performs a specific action onto the interface. These are used to avoid cluttering of elements and help form a hierarchy in the design. Dropdowns on some websites are major examples of hidden affordances.
  Although it helps to make the design look clean and minimal they can hamper user experience to an extent, as sometimes the user looking for something maybe part of an hidden dropdown. Thus these should be carefully.

Functional Affordances:

• The functional affordances are where the element or object signifies the action or usage through it’s placement, it’s design or both. The placement or design itself act as an instruction for the user to perform an action/predict the outcome when interacting with the object.

Metaphorical Affordances:

• Metaphorical Affordance use metaphors/icons/symbols to indicate the meaning and suggest interactions. One of the most commonly used is the famous search icons, used in almost every website. The magnifying glass is used widely in search bars, indicating that this field can be used to search something on the webpage.
  But a common anomaly in Metaphorical affordances can be the context. That is sometimes a magnifying glass may be used with a search bar, but in a document viewer this magnifying glass maybe used as a button to magnify/zoom in into the document.

Pattern Affordances:

• Pattern affordances as the name suggests rely of common patterns that user recognize already. Good example are the navbars. Almost every website has a navbar, and thus it’s a common knowledge of the user to click on the elements. Another pattern can be the logo. in post sites, the logo takes you to the home page of the website.

How are affordances used in UX design?

• Visual Cues: Affordances are often conveyed visually through elements or objects like buttons, icons, and animations. For example, a button with a raised appearance may suggest that it can be pressed.
• Consistency: Consistent affordances are used in an interface to bring down the learning curve and the affordances are clear and recognizable to the user. Consistent colors, animations or styles help achieve this.
• Feedback: Affordances also acknowledge the action taken by the user. For example a button when hovered, changes appearance indicating that it’s clickable.
• Progressive Disclosure: Affordances also make use of progressive disclosure, where complex features/animations/elements are hidden until needed.
  For example, the drop down menu seen in Functional affordances show a down icon, indicating that there are additional options available, but are hidden.

How to Design the Best Affordances?

User Centric approach:

• Understand the user’s requirements, context and experiencing well. This helps us to use the right type of affordances to use in an design. Understanding the prospective users of the interface will thus help us evaluate our choices of using the type of affordance.

Clarity:

• Affordances used in the design should be clear and recognizable to a wide group of users. Familiar and icons with fairly simple and abstract style should be used. Using icons that align close to user’s expectations can also help to enhance the efficiency of a affordance used.

Consistency in affordances:

• Using a good consistency in the design patterns of an affordance is a very important aspect. Unexpected interactions and oddly places or used affordances will lead to user confusion, increase the cognitive load and hamper the learning curve. This includes animations, icons or colors being used in the affordance.

Follow mainstream practices:

• Even when your goal is to make a more unique and intuitive design, the affordances used should not be much away from the mainstream practices. Making the affordances more mainstream or pattern based will only scale the usability of your design.

Use signifiers:

• Using signifiers help enhance the efficiency of the element. Especially if your user group demands better usability over aesthetics, using signifiers generously helps you easily achieve that. This includes using text labels or colors that will directly indicate the usage or interaction.

Benefits

• Guide user behavior: Affordances help users to understand the navigation of the interface and learn how to interact with the design.
• Enhance usability: When we aim for designs that demand usability over aesthetics, affordances help us to provide good usability to any design.
• Encourage interaction: When users understand and learn the interactions and expected results of interacting with a design, it encourages them to explore more of the design. Poor use will create doubts and exploring the interface may not be preferred by the user.

Conclusion

In the world of UX, affordances play a vital role in crafting intuitive designs, guiding users through moves with out requiring explicit instructions to interact with the elements. To excel in affordance layout, designers should understand users, hold consistency, provide feedback.