With all respect to Gilly's grandson, that's not quite right. At least, the
term may have evolved to have that meaning in Sydney, but that's not how it's
used by user experience practitioners / interface designers here.
At least in the UK/US, affordance refers to the perceivable properties of an
element, especially with respect to the actions you can take with it. (The
term is corrupted from use in other disciplines - it should really be
"perceived affordance" or similar - but I won't go into that.)
So the icon of a floppy disk is an affordance only to the extent that we've
all been trained to recognise that clicking a button with that icon will save
our current document (even those too young to have ever used an actual floppy
disk). But the term applies equally well to any other clear and obvious
control, even if it doesn't implicitly refer to something very old (e.g.
airplane icon on the button to select airplane mode) or indeed refer to
something concrete at all (e.g. the reload icon of a circular arrow). Or
indeed to a button with the word "Save" on it.
I don't know if there is a word with the meaning that Stephen actually wanted
- an opportunity to coin one! The nearest I can think of is "anachronistic",
but that's not quite right - there's nothing wrong with these icons, it's just
that their derivation relates to something historic.
Let us know what you come up with....
Ben
On 15/08/2016 09:50, Gillian Snoxall wrote:
Hi Stephen,
I put your question to my grandson (who was an Apple Genius in Sydney), and he
immediately came up with “affordance” as the word you are looking for. Sounds
crazy to me, but he insists that that is the technical term to describe the use
of icons depicting things that no longer exist, in modern applications.
Gilly
On 13 Aug 2016, at 15:06, [email protected] wrote:
… describe icons used in modern applications that show items that are obsolete
or dated and not used for the task in hand?
For example, at work we are quickly phasing out flatbed scanners and very
strongly encourage people to use phones and tablets to photograph documents and
send them to us. Our new interface has a “Send document” button which shows a
flatbed scanner!
The latest MS Word (for Windows) has a floppy disc icon to click which saves
your work. Neither of the two guys I work with have ever seen or used a 3.5”
floppy disc.
The generic icon used for a storage device is frequently a hard disc even when
the device has Solid State storage.
And will the same soon apply to the icon for a camera?
Just idle Saturday wondering.
Stephen
"Technology is the knack of rearranging the world so that we don't have to
experience it" - Max Frisch
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