Rex Hartson's Concept of Affordances Flashcards
(30 cards)
What is the User Action Framework Model created by Rex Hartson?
Integrated framework for usability inspection, usability problem reporting, usability framework for usability inspection, usability data management, and design guidelines, which acknowledges the relationship between users and computers.
What are the four different types of affordances that acknowledges the relationship between users and computers?
- Physical Affordances
- Cognitive Affordances
- Sensory Affordances
- Emotional Affordances
What are Physical Affordances?
A physical affordance is a design feature that helps, aids, supports, facilitates, or enables physically doing something.
Active elements in a screen-based user interface.
e.g., The size and location of a command button, which affects how quickly and accurately the user can click on this particular screen element.
What are Cognitive Affordances?
A cognitive affordance is a design feature that helps, aid, supports, facilitates, or enables thinking and/or knowing about something.
They are elements of design that help the user with their cognitive activities, which encompass thinking, learning, understanding, problem-solving, decision-making, and remembering.
e.g., Any label, text or set of instructions that convey what will happen in the system following interaction, such as clicking or pressing on a certain key.
What are Sensory Affordances?
A sensory affordance is a design feature that help, aids, supports, facilitates, or enables the user in sensing.
Sensory affordance includes design features or devices associated with visual, auditory, haptic/tactile, or other sensations”.
e.g., seeing, hearing, feeling something
What are Functional Affordances?
A design feature that helps users accomplish work (i.e, the usefulness of a system function),
The utility or purposefulness component of physical affordance.
e.g., The system’s capacity to move a whole set of files from one folder to another (following the user clicking cut and paste).
How does Hartson treat interaction elements in graphical user interfaces (icons, buttons, and inline linked words)? and how does Norman treat them?
As physical affordances.
Norman views them as perceived affordances, as user is able to interact (click) anywhere on the screen, but through symbolic communication (symbols, texts, and icons) and convention (also referred to as cultural constraints), the user is able to identify the affordance to click on specific regions of the screen to carry out meaningful actions.
What is the purpose of identifying and distinguishing different types of affordance?
a) provide us with a consistent set of terms and definitions to encourage and support the process of conversing, sharing ideas, and understanding.
b) To provide a set of guidelines, of sorts, that allow us to access and evaluate designs according to the effectiveness of individual types of affordances and how well they ‘work together’ to improve ease-of-use, learnability, and support experienced and new/intermittent users alike during the process of HCI.
Hartson’s concept of cognitive affordances is most closely related to Norman’s concept of…?
Perceived Affordances
Vibrations on users’ devices to alert them to certain events is an example of which kind of affordance?
Sensory Affordance
When users interact with an interface, the things they execute are which of these?
a. Functional and meaningful.
b. Cognitive, physical and sensory.
c. Cognitive, actionable and meaningful.
b. Cognitive, physical and sensory
What are the three sources of information that help us identify what we can do and how we are to behave/interact with these permitted actions?
- Experiential
- Environmental
- Cognitive Affordances
What does Experiential mean in HCI affordances?
Information or knowledge the person has acquired from formal training, previous interactions with the same or similar products/designs, or passive observation.
e.g., A computer user may have learned that clicking on the screen, holding down the mouse button and moving the cursor allows them to select a particular section of text on the screen.
What does Environmental mean in HCI affordances?
The physical or real affordances, which are revealed by the perceptible, actionable properties of the thing itself. In the real-world, environmental information exists naturally, as opposed to resulting from artificial or contrived signals that have been implemented by another person or people (e.g. designers, architects, and town planners).
However, is HCI physical properties of objects are not inherent; instead, they are the result of design decisions, intended to improve usability and help users establish the ‘where? what, when, and how of hci.
For example, the size and location of a command button, such as a ‘Purchase Now’ or ‘One Click Purchase’ button when ordering products online, help us determine which parts of the screen afford meaningful actions.
What does Cognitive affordance in HCI ?
These are the qualities added to the environment or product by a person, designer, or group of people to communicate what the user can do, where they can do it, and when they can carry out these actions.
e.g., physical affordances, such as command buttons, often have corresponding cognitive affordances, which help the user predict the outcome(s) of their actions.
The clarity and quality of the relationship between the cognitive affordance and the resulting outcome(s) has a huge impact on the overall user experience.
What is an example of providing cognitive affordance?
Labelling physical objects in graphical user interfaces.
What are the four categories of Cognitive Affordances in HCI?
- Understanding
- Learning and Remembering
- Decision-making
- Problem-solving
Which of the following is the best example of a cognitive affordance?
a. “Place Order” on a button.
b. A chime to indicate an email has been sent.
c. Blue text.
a. “Place Order” on a button
The placement and size of a “Place Order” button refer to which source of information?
Environmental
What is the concept of physical affordance?
Inter-related with the concepts of sensory, cognitive, and functional affordances.
What are the physical qualities of objects in GUI design?
Size, shape, and location
In human-computer interaction what does Fitt’s Law refer to?
It refers to movement through the graphical user interface using a cursor or other type of pointer.
Which affordance represents the first stage in the process of making sense of and interpreting our surroundings to determine the action possibilities available to us?
Sensing
Sensory affordances are components of which two other affordances, which help us establish the look, feel, sound, and other sensations associated with the objects in our environment that assist us with our cognitive and physical activities?
Physical and Cognitive affordances
Sensory affordance is central to the concepts of cognitive and physical affordance.
