ProductImpactTool.org

guidance

One type of technical mediation in the before-the-eye quadrant is guidance. Products give users suggestions about possible use. A well-known concept that helps understanding impacts on behavior through cognitive suggestion is affordance. Donald Norman, a pioneering scholar in cognitive ergonomics, took the notion of affordance from the field of environmental psychology and elaborated it in the context of design. Affordances, in the applied sense of Norman, are the use action possibilities that users recognize when they perceive products (Norman 1988). The concept of affordance helps to analyze how buttons, grips, displays, meters, ribs, etcetera, all physical features, are cognitively associated with possible actions, uses.