Friday, October 21, 2005

 

Designed Affordances as Communication

While talking about human-computer interaction today, I realized most people are still unfamiliar with some of the basic terminology, like designed affordances. I thought it could be useful to add a link here for people who wanted to get acquainted with HCI basic concepts, so I went to one of the best sources: Donald Norman's website. Oddly enough, what I've found was probably not so great as introductory material (you've to buy the books for that :-), but still interesting enough to be suggested here.
Have a look at Designed Affordances as Communication, where Norman talks a little about affordances and then introduces a concept from Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza: interaction is not a communication with technology, but communication between the designer [of that technology] and the person [user], where the technology is [just] the medium. He then goes ahead with another interesting concept, "Why Stories Are Superior to Logic", which is brilliant although (I'm afraid) a little hard to practice. Overall, I can't say the piece is one of the best Norman's writings, but those two concepts alone make it a must read...
This is my first post decorated with invisible semantic tags! I know I won't see a custom search engine anytime soon, but hey, I could always persuade someone to write me one in php :-). More seriously, if you have any visual issue on some weird browser :-), please let me know (unless the issue is so serious you can't see this :-))

posted by Carlo.Pescio @ 6:13 PM <permalink>
bookmarking:    
Comments: Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?