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Your understanding of the term affordance, as inferred from your usage of it, is not the standard use. You use it as if it means the reason for something. Affor

Your understanding of the term affordance, as inferred from your usage of it, is not the standard use. You use it as if it means the reason for something. Affordance is a clue something gives regarding its use. Doors with handles are pulled, with plates are pushed. Just seeing the interface component intrinsically describes its use. This is not possible for invisible components, therefore they have no affordance at all. Saying they have a reason in the designer's mind, to declutter an interface and make it all pretty and clean, is not related to saying they have an affordance, which is that they show the user how to use them. Buttons look pushable. Scroll bars look draggable. Invisible elements don't look anything. "Your brain is able to predict that if you don't see it, it might very well be rollover-only." This statement is so wrong I don't even know how to react to it or steer you away from this sort of thinking. I'm just completely taken aback. Not trying to be argumentative or anything, but no no no no no. No, the user is not going to intuit that the function must be invisible because he can't see it. Arg. Here is the proof. Usability testing.

dhx 15y ago
the user is not going to intuit that the function must be invisible because he can't see it User intuition changes over time as familiarity with new interfaces is gained. A system whereby edit/action buttons appear only when the mouse is on the right hand side of the screen seems reasonable -- if users have trained themselves to expect this behaviour and UIs consistently use this pattern in predictable ways. If every user interface with mouse input used a "hover the cursor to the right of the screen for edit/action buttons" pattern, it'd become quite natural to users. Gnome 3 is a good example of where hidden elements are used successfully. Hovering the mouse in the top left "Activities" corner of the screen will show hidden content. The bottom right corner of the screen also shows hidden content (this time, without any visual affordance). Users learn to expect the hidden items to appear when hovering the cursor. No affordance is required. The downside is that users may not be able to discover this behaviour without help from a tutorial or manual (at least until "hot corners" become a standard UI pattern).
- anatoly 15y ago
  What you describe works fine in theory; the problem is that in practice it's ridiculously easy to overestimate how likely the average user is to train themselves to expect this behavior. In general, we (power users, developers, etc.) tend to adapt to consistent UI behaviours very quickly and to overestimate how difficult it is for an average user, but when it comes to things that are _invisible_ until you do something, the gap is much greater yet.
- kstenerud 15y ago
  Those are specific positions on a screen in a desktop OS UI. That's HUGELY different from yet-another-webapp, because you only need to learn it ONCE, and then it remains the same always, no matter what app you're using or what page you're viewing. With web pages and apps, it's up to each designer to decide where and how things are laid out, and everyone has their own opinion, so if 20 designers decide to hide their components, how is the user to find them? The last thing I want to do is play hide-and-seek moving the mouse around a webpage/app randomly in the forlorn hope that maybe one of the gadgets or magic locations will pop up a control that I can use. Put in a gear icon that I can mouse over. Put SOMETHING there that says "hey! I can be interacted with!" Otherwise I'll just ascribe the interface as designed by someone incompetent and look for an alternative.
- gtirloni 15y ago
  The use of "GNOME 3" and "a good example" in the same phrase has been banned by the International Association of Common Sense.
stephth 15y ago
Affordance is a clue something gives regarding its use. I misinterpreted your "What is the affordance of invisibility?" question as in "what are the benefits of invisibility?". Thanks for clarifying. I didn't know (and couldn't find) that specific definition of affordance. Is it a technical term? Just seeing the interface component intrinsically describes its use. This is not possible for invisible components, therefore they have no affordance at all. It's true. But this isn't very relevant to this article is it? we're talking about hidden items, not invisible items. "Your brain is able to predict that if you don't see it, it might very well be rollover-only." This statement is so wrong I don't even know how to react to it or steer you away from this sort of thinking. I'm just completely taken aback. Not trying to be argumentative or anything, but no no no no no. No, the user is not going to intuit that the function must be invisible because he can't see it. Arg. You can be argumentative by showing some reasoning to your opinion. That would help. What is wrong with my statement in your perspective? Either way maybe I can clarify further. I don't think intuition and experience (prediction) are separated. I strongly believe in Jeff Hawkin's theory [1]. All we do is this: we learn things, and later, based on what we learned, we make predictions, and act based on those predictions. And I think this is very relevant with interface design. If a certain pattern becomes frequent, people will become familiar with that pattern, and that pattern will become more usable. The drawback to that is that some patterns may be crappy, but it's still something I take into consideration in making interfaces, consciously or not. Of course you can try to ignore all that and think completely outside of the box - I've tried it a few times and while it's a lot of fun, a lot of people get disoriented for longer, even though the concepts are simple. Think about how fast the learning curve in a simple 2D platform game is. Their rules are quite alien to our real world (super high jumps without dying, hitting bricks throws a mushroom, etc etc) but what makes that learning curve really fast is that we've learned it again and again. It wasn't easy the first time, but 2D platform are a familiar pattern; my generation has learned it since early age, with Mario and Sonic. Intuitive is, in a way, anything that feels familiar. And a familiar pattern in github is hidden functionality that appears with a rollover. If I don't see something, I can guess that it may show up when I so a rollover. Here is the proof. Usability testing. How does usability testing prove that "the user is not going to intuit that the function must be invisible because he can't see it"? Can you elaborate? Have you done the testing or have you read about it being statistically proven otherwise? [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_will_change_computing.html http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_w... (to be clear I'm alluding to the part about prediction)

dhx 15y ago

the user is not going to intuit that the function must be invisible because he can't see it User intuition changes over time as familiarity with new interfaces is gained. A system whereby edit/action buttons appear only when the mouse is on the right hand side of the screen seems reasonable -- if users have trained themselves to expect this behaviour and UIs consistently use this pattern in predictable ways. If every user interface with mouse input used a "hover the cursor to the right of the screen for edit/action buttons" pattern, it'd become quite natural to users. Gnome 3 is a good example of where hidden elements are used successfully. Hovering the mouse in the top left "Activities" corner of the screen will show hidden content. The bottom right corner of the screen also shows hidden content (this time, without any visual affordance). Users learn to expect the hidden items to appear when hovering the cursor. No affordance is required. The downside is that users may not be able to discover this behaviour without help from a tutorial or manual (at least until "hot corners" become a standard UI pattern).

anatoly 15y ago
What you describe works fine in theory; the problem is that in practice it's ridiculously easy to overestimate how likely the average user is to train themselves to expect this behavior. In general, we (power users, developers, etc.) tend to adapt to consistent UI behaviours very quickly and to overestimate how difficult it is for an average user, but when it comes to things that are _invisible_ until you do something, the gap is much greater yet.
kstenerud 15y ago
Those are specific positions on a screen in a desktop OS UI. That's HUGELY different from yet-another-webapp, because you only need to learn it ONCE, and then it remains the same always, no matter what app you're using or what page you're viewing. With web pages and apps, it's up to each designer to decide where and how things are laid out, and everyone has their own opinion, so if 20 designers decide to hide their components, how is the user to find them? The last thing I want to do is play hide-and-seek moving the mouse around a webpage/app randomly in the forlorn hope that maybe one of the gadgets or magic locations will pop up a control that I can use. Put in a gear icon that I can mouse over. Put SOMETHING there that says "hey! I can be interacted with!" Otherwise I'll just ascribe the interface as designed by someone incompetent and look for an alternative.
gtirloni 15y ago
The use of "GNOME 3" and "a good example" in the same phrase has been banned by the International Association of Common Sense.

stephth 15y ago

Affordance is a clue something gives regarding its use. I misinterpreted your "What is the affordance of invisibility?" question as in "what are the benefits of invisibility?". Thanks for clarifying. I didn't know (and couldn't find) that specific definition of affordance. Is it a technical term? Just seeing the interface component intrinsically describes its use. This is not possible for invisible components, therefore they have no affordance at all. It's true. But this isn't very relevant to this article is it? we're talking about hidden items, not invisible items. "Your brain is able to predict that if you don't see it, it might very well be rollover-only." This statement is so wrong I don't even know how to react to it or steer you away from this sort of thinking. I'm just completely taken aback. Not trying to be argumentative or anything, but no no no no no. No, the user is not going to intuit that the function must be invisible because he can't see it. Arg. You can be argumentative by showing some reasoning to your opinion. That would help. What is wrong with my statement in your perspective? Either way maybe I can clarify further. I don't think intuition and experience (prediction) are separated. I strongly believe in Jeff Hawkin's theory [1]. All we do is this: we learn things, and later, based on what we learned, we make predictions, and act based on those predictions. And I think this is very relevant with interface design. If a certain pattern becomes frequent, people will become familiar with that pattern, and that pattern will become more usable. The drawback to that is that some patterns may be crappy, but it's still something I take into consideration in making interfaces, consciously or not. Of course you can try to ignore all that and think completely outside of the box - I've tried it a few times and while it's a lot of fun, a lot of people get disoriented for longer, even though the concepts are simple. Think about how fast the learning curve in a simple 2D platform game is. Their rules are quite alien to our real world (super high jumps without dying, hitting bricks throws a mushroom, etc etc) but what makes that learning curve really fast is that we've learned it again and again. It wasn't easy the first time, but 2D platform are a familiar pattern; my generation has learned it since early age, with Mario and Sonic. Intuitive is, in a way, anything that feels familiar. And a familiar pattern in github is hidden functionality that appears with a rollover. If I don't see something, I can guess that it may show up when I so a rollover. Here is the proof. Usability testing. How does usability testing prove that "the user is not going to intuit that the function must be invisible because he can't see it"? Can you elaborate? Have you done the testing or have you read about it being statistically proven otherwise? [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_will_change_computing.html http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_w... (to be clear I'm alluding to the part about prediction)