Technology Affordances

Ecological approaches to psychology suggest succinct
accounts ofeasily-used artifacts. Affordances are properties
of the world that are compatible with and relevant for
people’s interactions. When affordances are perceptible,
they offer a direct link between perception and action;
hidden and false affordances lead to mistakes. Complex actions can be understood in terms of groups of affordances that are sequential in time or nested in space, and in terms of the abilities of different media to reveal them. I illustrate this discussion with several examples of interface
techniques, and suggest that the concept of affordances can
provide a useful tool for user-centered analyses of
technologies.