Summary: Affordances invite interactions. Signifiers nudge the action. Affordances and signifiers are a UX Design concept that are fundamental to understand. If you design for what you think is intuitive, you might accidentally build bias into your design. In this video, Frank Spillers helps explain the difference

 What Are Affordances in UX Design?

Affordance is all about invitation. It’s how an object suggests its use. If something is designed well, it naturally invites the right interaction. In the case of the door handle, a flat plate on a door suggests “push,” while a handle or knob suggests “pull.” But when a design doesn’t make that clear? Users are left frustrated: searching, learning, thinking…and that’s a failure in the design process. Worse, it violates the rule of all rules: “Don’t make me think“.

An affordance invites interaction. A well-designed button invites a click. A form field invites input. An intuitive scroll bar invites movement through content. But there’s more to it than just affordances.

Signifiers: Affordance’s Essential Partner

An affordance might invite interaction, but sometimes it’s not enough. This is where signifiers come in. Signifiers provide the clues or nudges that help users understand what action they should take. Think of an arrow pointing to a “Sign Up” button. The arrow doesn’t just sit there for decoration—it’s a signifier, guiding the user to where they should click.

Without signifiers, even the best affordance can fail. Imagine a perfectly clickable button on a website, but it’s hidden under a gray-on-gray color scheme. No one can find it because the signifiers—the visual cues—aren’t there. It’s like putting up a door with no signs or clues about whether to push or pull. Sure, it might be a beautiful door, but if people can’t figure out how to open it, the design fails.

VIDEO: Affordances in UX Design: Must have or optional?

Transcript:

In one of my first design jobs, I was walking through a door with my UX director, and he said: “What’s the difference between push and pull on the door handle?”. I had to stop and think, and I was like: ‘Push pushes it open, pull pulls it open’. I’d never thought of it before my boss was describing a ‘Norman door‘ as it’s been termed. Don Norman, who popularized the term affordance in the design community, said that, quote “The term affordance refers to the relationship between a physical object and a person”, unquote. But that’s not entirely clear. People don’t have relationships with doorknobs they just want to open them!

That’s right, users want to do things without thinking about them: “Don’t make me think”, right? As a designer, your job is to make it apparent how to interact with things: links, buttons, icons—- Services, employees, policies…and yes, door knobs! I’ve worked with creative directors who wanted clean interfaces, and that means ‘gray on gray’, no underlined links– buttons that are so flat you can’t see them. Hiding controls is not a strategy! An affordance invites an interaction, and its sister is a signifier that highlights or nudges the interaction. Think of an arrow next to a signup link: smart!

Look if you design things that are so clean a user has to think or figure it out– it’s not intuitive– intuitive means no thinking or no understanding required. You just use it! So a good affordance and a signifier can invite and nudge in that area that’s just below cognition– below thinking. So the only one that has the relationship with an affordance is the designer.

• Use volition: that means conscious intent when you design.
• Use what Brenda Laurel calls informed intuition, do user research, and study patterns of familiarity. If the thing doesn’t exist, study in and around the space or related items or interactions.

You’ll answer questions like:

• What do users know?
• How do they do it already? or
• How do they use related controls?

A lot of bad design is from designers who are familiar with interactions…and this familiarity bias gets hidden in their designs or “cleaned up”. So make sure you expose your rules or policies– because rules and policies often are what end up in complicated designs. And once you surface them, then you can design them out with clear affordances and signifiers. Thank you so much, see you soon!