Affordance Group Critique

Today`s group critique, was about the affordance task we were given last week. To be honest I did not really fully understood about all the high,low,placebo affordance before, so i was kind of unsure for the things i have picked. 

During the critique, we were asked to pick five of our favourite examples from other people, it didn't need to be one from each category, just the one we like. once we have picked our fav, we will talk about why it is our fav and how does it answer the requirement for its assigned affordance.

One i remember very well is the placebo affordance from Pim, which was a gaming mouse designed to be customised by the user to fit their own need. Shial picked it as low affordance because he has an experience of using it(which is own by his friend) yet he would accidentally push some other bottoms on the the mouse then trigger some other functions within the application he was working on. In therms of usability upon the mouse itself to people who is not the original owner, this would feel to be a low affordance because the mouse setting was not customised to fit everyone`s using habit/need but the very person who owns it. 

So I did not agree that to be a low affordance and certainly not placebo affordance which Pim assigned it. Yet, it doe not change the majority of the group as they feel all the bottoms were only to confuse them instead of improving the productivity. 

This argument leads to a good discussion, which is: How do we exactly define an object`s affordance? 

Now-a-day, many things have been designed to be a specific type of product, which serves some specific group of people with a more complex system or functionality. so are we judging these type of product by a common view or a more professional view. For instance the gaming mouse, for a larger group of everyday user all the customisation and bottoms seem to lower the affordance because they don`t see the necessity of these extra features. On the other hand, many gamers will appreciate these functions because normal mouse along isn`t enough for their need, therefore the gaming mouse products are high affordance for them because it suits their need.

One other example, Photoshop and ease to use photo editing app for mobile. One would say photoshop defiantly has a higher affordance due to the mobile apps are simply not enough of functionality to achieve what they wanted to achieve, that is a professional view. For the everyday user view, they just want a simple app to make a simple editing to their photos, they do not need photoshop`s fancy features as it is too complicated for them, therefore they thing the mobile app has a higher affordance than photoshop. I mean these two views are valid in their own opinion, but with a different result. There is a need to define Affordance in a more detail way if we are to take it to a further discussion or consider it to be part of our design work.

This is the thing I learnt the most and really got me thinking about today, what are affordance? which target group are we talking about and which is the most important group we need to care more? I really learnt a lot today on the definition of affordance for different people.