Affordances Are…
The concept of affordances points to a rather special
configuration of properties. It implies that the physical
attributes of the thing to be acted upon are compatible
with those of the actor, that information about those
attributes is available in a form compatible with a
perceptual system, and (implicitly) that these attributes
and the action they make possible are relevant to a
culture and a perceiver. Artifacts may be analyzed to see
how close they are to this configuration of properties,
and thus what affordances they convey.
For instance, MacLean et al. [13] discuss a user-tailorable
system of onscreen buttons and their experiences
introducing them to non-technical users (Figure 3).
Users intuitively understood that these buttons could be
"pressed" using the mouse, but their tailorable attributes
were not spontaneously manipulated. MacLean et al.