Understanding Affordance: How intuitive design can Make or Break
I love simplicity in product design. A few years ago when I unboxed my new Starlink dish for home internet, I was expecting an all-day, headache-inducing setup process. I was delightfully surprised when I opened the box and found the following instructions:
No words. No disclaimers or safety instructions. Just 3 steps. And it was all so obvious what to do with the hardware provided. Instructions probably weren’t even required. Buying an iphone is a similar experience. Steve Jobs was a master in this area. Within minutes you’re fully functional and the design is so intuitive (except the new mission control setup, who did that mess?) that it’s pretty much dummy proof.
I’ve realized it’s more than just simplicity that I love, because I do really enjoy robust tech. I resonate strongly with design that has high “affordance”. Affordance is a term many won’t be familiar with, but if you’re in business and sell a product or service you should be.
The simple definitionof “affordance” is: the quality of an object that suggests how it should be used. Put another way, “how easily does the design communicate its intended use or utility”?
A button is pressable. A handle is to be grabbed or turned. A direction arrow on the ground is to be followed. All of these have high affordance.
The term was coined by psychologist James Gibson and then adapted by Don Norman for design in his book “The Design of Everyday Things“. It’s an extremely important concept because it tells us a lot about how people react to product design, and thus how likely they are to adopt it. Products with high affordance are easily understood. Products with low affordance risk creating cognitive overload and the “paradox of choice”.
Which one of the washing machine knobs below makes sense and which one makes you want to take a nap?
A great example of this is illustrated by Rory Sutherland in his book “Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life”. Sutherland recounts the birth of the Sony Walkman, the ancestor of the ipod and first pocket radio. When engineers proudly brought the first prototype to Akio Morita, founder of Sony, they were dismayed when he told them to reduce its functionality by taking out the recording function. Wouldn’t more features be better? Not necessarily. Morita feared the recording function would confuse people about what the new device was for. Was this a dictation device? Should I record live music on this? Or record my vinyl records onto cassettes? By taking out the recording function, Sony created a product with less functionality but high affordance, and one much more likely to be quickly adopted.
I really like the UI CoVet uses for their AI scribe app. See pic below. This is a robust tool that could be very overwhelming given its functionality and number of features. But the UI only takes a few seconds to navigate, and if I’m unsure what to do I feel like I should just click the big blue button and start recording. It’s just drawing me in. Because that’s really the core of this app. Once I do start recording something I quickly figure out the myriad things I can do with it.
Science-based companies often lead with data and functionality, but forget that great product design starts with user intuition. We create products that claim to do everything, and we bombard users with functionality and scientific stats to back them up. We’ve mastered p-values, but not packaging.
Which brings me to veterinary medicine. Can the concept of affordance help us in designing better products for the future? I think it can. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and would love to have you explore the topic with me.
At this point I risk veering off from the actual definition of affordance and talking more about friction and user experience, but it’s my newsletter so I’m going to do it anyway. While the original concept of affordance was rooted in physical design, I think the core idea of reducing the mental work required to understand and use a product applies just as much to digital tools, therapeutics, diagnostics, and even report formatting.
Novel and emerging diagnostics and therapeutics take a while to be adopted, for many reasons. They’re not in our routine. They haven’t earned a spot in the reflexive toolbag we reach for when presented with a case of “x” disease. Companies launching new therapeutics or diagnostic tests are tasked with figuring out how to:
- get doctors to understand the product
- get the new product into that doctor’s routine tool bag
The more general-purpose a novel diagnostic test is, the harder it can be for the average veterinarian to immediately grasp its core utility. Especially when they are used to diagnostics with a single, specific purpose. For example, most are familiar with ordering PARR to confirm lymphoma, or cKIT mutation testing to decide whether to use toceranib for mast cell tumors. But when we introduce a cutting-edge cancer genomic profiling assay that applies to all cancer types and provide diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic insights, oh and here’s a 12-page report filled with mutation data and molecular associations……we’ve now crossed into cognitive overload territory. Cryptic test names, overloaded reports, and ordering platforms that look like a pilot’s dashboard all contribute to low affordance in products.
Clinicians aren’t overwhelmed by complexity. They’re overwhelmed by ambiguity. High-affordance tools don’t remove complexity, they clarify purpose. I think we can do a better job launching successful products in veterinary medicine. Our products can be rooted in good science and feel intuitive to use. Affordance doesn’t guarantee adoption. But lack of affordance guarantees friction. And friction kills products.
Send me your thoughts, ideas, questions, and pushback. I’m ruminating on this topic more and would enjoy the perspective of others.
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