I have always been interested in the idea of affordances in user interfaces since I first heard the term. So naturally I was very interested to read an article by Donald Norman - the original researcher to bring the term from psychology to design - about the importance of signifiers instead of affordances.

The term affordances was coined by psychologist J. J. Gibson to explain the possible actions that a specific agent can take on a specific object. Norman brought the idea of affordances, which are realities that exist regardless of the agent's knowledge of them, to design in the guise of "perceivable affordances." For Norman's design work, an unperceived affordance is essentially nothing.

In his article, Norman espouses the idea that designers should forget about affordances and focus on the signs that affordances exist; these he calls signifiers. His reasoning is straightforward - it's not the fact that this user interface widget can be dragged that is important to design, but the signifier that indicates to the user that the item can be dragged.

This commercial plays at the end of some of the TED Talks. What I noticed was the way the video performs transitions between shots. I like the clean colored text and the outline which then becomes a portal to a different scene. This is a nice way to do cuts and something that could be used in a Flash/Flex website or application.

User Interface Design section.

Resources on usability, user interface, interaction, design, design patterns, data visualization and more:

Edward Tufte

Inventor of sparklines.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/

Books/Essays:

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• Envisioning Information
• Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
• Beautiful Evidence
• The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

Robert Spence

The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

- Douglas Adams

Programming visuals, games, UI, HCI, software design, and language (as in the English language) have long been subjects of interest for me. Working at Cynergy Systems means that I can focus on using Adobe Flex to pursue these interests. This website is an outlet for me to share my thoughts with the Universe, whether or not you think it was a bad move to create it in the first place.