Affordances and Their Importance to UX Practitioners
What you'll learn
- By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Know and apply the differences between the types of affordances in the context of UX design
- Understand and apply the UX design issues for each type of affordance
- Use the different kinds of affordances together as an alliance in UX design
- Identify false affordances and know how to avoid them in UX design
- Recognize user-created affordances occurring “in the wild” and interpret them as inputs to design
Requirements
- This course is completely self-contained and no additional materials, software, applications, or equipment are needed.
Description
In this interesting, enlightening, and sometimes entertaining close-up look at the concepts, the author carefully and clearly defines and explains affordances. Five different types of affordances are distinguished and the author shows how practitioners should use them together in UX design.The types of affordance and principles of their use are illustrated with engaging examples.
The course is entirely in the form of videos, as voice-over on PowerPoint slides. Lectures are interspersed with thought questions and exercises. The approximate running time of all the videos is about four hours, including the time to work out the questions and exercises.
Why take this course? Few topics in HCI or UX have been as misunderstood and misused as the notion of “affordance”. Yet few concepts are as central to effective UX design. The author of this course is a leading expert in the subject and this presentation is based on a seminal paper and a defining book chapter.
Who this course is for:
- This course is directed toward anyone currently engaged, or planning to be engaged, in interaction design for a high quality user experience. It will also be of value to anyone with an academic or practical interest in UX design. This includes students, graduate students, practitioners, project managers, and people who work with UX practitioners on design and development teams.
- Recognize user-created affordances occurring “in the wild” and interpret them as inputs to design
Instructor
Rex Hartson, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized consultant, author, teacher, and speaker on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and User eXperience (UX). Hartson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, where he was the founding faculty member in HCI in 1979. For 30 years, as a pioneer in HCI as a field and in usability engineering as a discipline and practice, he helped develop many of the techniques that are now considered an integral part of good practice.
Rex holds a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer & Information Science from the Ohio State University. His research, writing, and teaching have always been grounded in extensive interaction with UX practitioners and practical experience in consulting and training for business, industry, and government.
Currently, Hartson is co-author of new book on interaction design to ensure a high quality user experience (Rex Hartson and Pardha Pyla, The UX Book: Ensuring a High Quality User Experience, Morgan Kaufmann, 2012), winner of the Text and Academic Authors Association 2013 Most Promising New Textbook Award.