Persuasive Power

“The customer is King

King is always right

King never bargains”

Have you ever heard the saying before? Of course you do since this is something that had been planted in every store or industry available in the world. Affordance is the quality of an object or environment which allows a person to perform an action. For me, affordance is also one of the crucial elements of target marketing that is; demographics. In a way, affordance is something that permits a person to use the interface comfortably.

An example would be, switches. How do you know how/ways to flicker the switch? You…just know, right? There’s no need of an explanation, you just do.

So, that’s the gist of how affordance works. The point of affordance is for the user to know how it works without the help of a manual.

As Ms. Edina had asked to elaborate on the affordance of robot dog in this week’s class, I’ll write what I understand of it. Without the manual, most people automatically understood that the robot dog will more or less function like a real dog but of course without the needs for it to eat or take a poo. Thus, it gives the user an impression that taking care of a robot dog would be easier than taking care a real dog.

Since it is programmed to resemble a dog (except for the food and the poo), of course it’ll also be programmed on how to play with balls.

Perceived affordance on the other hand is the perceived properties of the object that suggest how the user could use it. It is use to guide users or as I understand it ‘corner’ user into choosing what the developer want the user to click on.