Introduction

Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things is Design Thinking 101 that should form the foundation for PM thinking for any student of the field.

An affordance is the relationship between a person and an object. Or to be more specific, it is the relationship between the properties of an object, and how those properties are perceived by a human.

For any user experience designer, this lays out the need for designing objects around the capabilities of the users.

Examples

Amex and PayTM’s Infinite Credit Loop

Back in college in IIT Delhi in around 2015-16, American Express was offering Credit Cards to students. Many of my friends racked up huge credit card bills in this time.
PayTM at that time had a major value proposition:

  1. It allowed you to add money to its wallet from various sources, including credit cards from Amex.
    American Express had two properties:
  2. You could pay back American Express credit using PayTM

The affordances of American Express and PayTM combined for the engineering undergrad - you can pay your credit card balance in an infinite loop using American Express and PayTM

The Bland TV remote

Consider a TV remote button to change the channel

  1. The properties of the button are:
    1. It is made of a soft surface
    2. It can move in one direction
    3. It has some markings
    4. In the pressed state, the remote sends a signal to the change to the next channel
  2. The human’s needs are:
    1. To change the channel on the TV
    2. Requirements of comfort in doing what they want to do on the television - most Televisions have controls on the television body, and yet not many users go to the TV to do it.

Gripping and pressing are affordances of the Television remote.

The properties of an affordance is jointly determined by the qualities of the object, and the abilities of the agent that is interacting.

The burning affordance of Dettol

The affordance of Feeling pain is taken as a signifier that dettol is better than Savlon.

Theory Deep Dive

From Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things:

When we interact with a product, we need to figure out how to work it. This means discovering what it does, how it works, and what operations are possible: discoverability. Discoverability results from appropriate application of five fundamental psychological concepts

  • Affordances
  • Signifiers
  • Constraints
  • Mappings
  • Feedback
    But there’s a sixth principle, perhaps the most important of all: the conceptual model of the system.

Takeaways for Product Managers

  1. The magic doesn’t lie in the feature, or in the intelligence of the user. The magic of great products lies in how the feature delights and enables the user to do their job.
  2. Simplicity lies in having the fewest affordances to enable the user to get their job done.
  3. Complexity always has the affordance of being difficult to comprehend, confusing the user, and hindering them from doing their job.