Discoverability
Discoverability results from appropriate application of five fundamental psychological concepts covered in the next few chapters: affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, and feedback. But there is a sixth principle, perhaps most important of all: the conceptual model of the system. It is the conceptual model that provides true understanding.
Affordance: Relationship of object and user, that enables some usage.
Don-Norman makes it very clear in his book that Affordance is NOT a property of an object. It is a relationship between the object and user.
His example is that chair affords sitting for an average adult, but does not afford sitting for ants.
Moreover there is a destinction between affordances that an object has an perceived affordances, what the target customer can perceive (see, feel, hear) that the product can do.
For me, the term signifier refers to any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that communicates appropriate behavior to a person. - Don-Norman
Personally I think we need adjust the definition of signfifier to
Any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that aims to communicate appropriate behavior to a person.
To highlight that whether signifier will successfully communicate the appropriate behavior is very much dependent on the agent/user of the product.
With that adjustment we introduce a separate term Signification:
Definition
When signifier successfully communicates the appropriate behavior to the customer/user of the product.
Why-Add-Signification
This distinction highlights the fact that when we add signifiers to products, not all of them will be able to successfully communicate the appropriate behavior to ALL users. For example, if a designer puts a PUSH sign on a door, while it is a clear signifier for English-speaking, non-visually impaired users of the door, it won't provide signification (communication of appropriate behavior) to non-English speakers or visually impaired users.
Hence, adding this distinction is envisioned to make us think more about which customers are going to get dropped off in the transition from signifier (what we envisioned/aimed to communicate) to signification (what was actually communicated).
For example, if we use colors to communicate something in the design as a signifier, the signification addition in the framework aims to highlight that color-blind users are not going to see the colors nearly as well as hoped. Hence, while the signfifier of colors is added, the signification (communication) is not actaully going to happen.
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