good-design
Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.
Discoverability: Is it possible to even figure out what actions are possible and where and how to perform them?
Understanding: What does it all mean? How is the product supposed to be used? What do all the different controls and settings mean?
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. - Don-Norman/Design of Every day things.
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.
Perceived affordance
Some ability/property of an object that user perceives (sees, hears, feels) to be true for the user.
Undiscovered Affordance
An object may have an affordance for a user, but if the user cannot perceive or discover it, the affordance provides little value.
To make sure desired affordance is discovered we must provide sufficient signifiers to enable discoverability of the features.
False Perceived Affordance
This is the dangerous type.
The user perceives an affordance that doesn't actually exist. This is dangerous and must be minimized.
Example: Pristine glass door without visible handles
A large, clean glass door may appear to be an open walkway.
It is perceived to afford walking through.
Someone walking at full speed could collide with it head-first, breaking their nose—or worse, breaking through the door and getting severely cut by the heavy glass, which also affords excellent cutting capability.
Example: Software that appears to have automated backup
A user sees a "Backup" section in settings with a toggle switch that appears enabled by default. They assume their data is being backed up automatically. However, the feature only backs up after explicit manual action, or requires additional configuration like connecting cloud storage. When their device fails, they discover months of work are permanently lost—the perceived automatic backup affordance never actually existed.
Don-Norman's definition:
For me, the term signifier refers to any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that communicates appropriate behavior to a person. - Don-Norman
My definition:
I think we need adjust the definition of signifier to highlight that whether signifier will successfully communicate the appropriate behavior is very much dependent on the agent/user of the product. Hence, we need to add additional AIMS-TO clarification into the definition of signifier:
Signifier: Any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that AIMS-TO communicate appropriate behavior to a person.
And add on additional term Signification:
Definition
When signifier successfully communicates the appropriate behavior to the customer/user of the product. In other words when the signifier communicates the affordance of the product that the customer wanted to use.
Signification is an add on to Don-Norman's framework of thinking about product design to highlight the fact that even when we add a signifier, whether the signifier is successful is also dependent on the person who is interacting with the product/signifier.
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). Thinking about which customers will not be able to utilize our signifier should help us to come up with more UNIVERSAL signifiers.
For example, if we use colors to communicate something in the design as a signifier, the signification addition in the mental framework aims to highlight that color-blind users are not going to see the colors nearly as well as hoped. Hence, while the signifier of colors is added, the signification (communication) is not actually going to happen.
Children
Backlinks