ACM Interactions

Authors:
Gerard Torenvliet

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Affordance. If ever a term separated the usability cognoscenti from everyone else, this is it. For a good, long time now, our trade's initiation rite has been the reading of Don Norman's The Psychology of Everyday Things (now published as The Design of Everyday Things). Norman's book introduced many of us (myself included) to the term affordance. As Norman's compelling arguments took hold, so did the term. It sprang up everywhere, moving from dusty journals to magazines and newspapers, and from there to the conceptual prime time of your local Starbucks. Somewhere on the way from academia to Starbucks,…

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