Reflection no. 3
Being an interaction design student I already had some prior knowledge about the topic at hand, affordances are one the key vital component in interaction design which is designed by keeping in mind the mental model of the target audience, badly designed affordances lead to a bad design which is the user can not understand. The class started with a discussion about affordances. Affordances are the perceivable action possible by the user. They are the action which the user perceives are possible by looking at the built and the material of the object. We also discussed how the affordance of the object doesn’t only depend on the object solely but also on the user and the environment in which the object is. The way in which the affordances are designed is to accommodate people having different mental models.
In further the discussion we discussed the different types of affordances there are. We discussed Real, Perceived, hidden, and false affordances. All physical objects have real affordances. Perceived affordances are those which the users perceive the design might offer, where an action may be implied due to the characteristics of the design. Hidden affordances are those which are not obvious, are hidden somewhere in the design. In hidden affordances, the user has to look or find the affordance due to the built of the design. False affordances in simpler terms are fake e.g placebo buttons. We further discussed these by making up different scenarios to make it more understandable. We also brushed on the topic of virtual affordances which I didn't quite understand but after having a discussion with sir Amir, I got a clear picture of what virtual affordances are. Virtual affordances lack real affordances (i.e physical objects have real affordances) because of which we categorize virtual affordances as perceived affordances.
We also discussed signifiers that give an indication of the affordance e.g the slit present on boxes indicates this is where the boxes lid will open. Some designs don’t provide signifiers due to which the affordances of that design become hidden, without signifiers the user can not comprehend what the affordance of the design is. Signifiers are designed on the mental models of the people, poorly designed signifiers can lead to confusion or even false affordances.
In the end, we had a miro assignment where we were divided into groups and were given different places. We had to categorize the products in different categories according to our understanding. We had a discussion in our group and I personally felt like the students were still confused or hadn't really grasped the idea of affordances because many of the objects they placed under their respective labels were wrong (according to my understanding).
