A Case Study of Affordance Identification by the User Observation and Analysis

Affordance that is about characteristics in the appearance of an object that gives clues for its proper operations was introduced by Norman. This paper investigates the relationships between affordances and features, which are very critical to allow human activities or behaviors. We conducted a case study in a public space - a building lobby - used by many general people for extracting the affordances with related features. User activities and behaviors were analyzed in several specific tasks given to twenty students in the lobby of a building they have never been to before. Then we identified affordances and building structure elements, called affordance features, critically related to those affordances. The affordance features have hierarchical nature, like areas, set, objects and detail attributes. Affordance-Feature map obtained this kind of case studies could be used in developing a repository for affordance based design so that specific affordance features could be retrieved in support of certain affordances.