Affordance
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.
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