What is the difference between affordance and signifier?

Affordances and signifiers are essential to create a successful user experience. Here, we look at what each term means and why they are important.

What Are Affordances?

Affordances describe how a user sees the relationship between themselves and an object. In UX, you might say an object “affords” an action. For example, if a door has a door handle, it means it is to open. A wall cannot afford to open because it has no perceivable mechanism to open.

Here are some real-world examples that illustrate why affordances are key to designing intuitive and easy-to-use experiences.

“When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.”

— Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things

What Are Signifiers?

A “signifier” is a perceivable cue about an affordance. Don Norman introduced the term to make a clear distinction between the signal an affordance might provide to a person, and the actual affordance itself. Affordances can exist without any signifier—the signifier part of an affordance may be invisible (or deceptive). An example of an affordance without a signifier might be a door with no discernible hinges, doorknob, or push plate. An object with a signifier but no affordance would be a “push” sign attached to a static wall. Both can cause frustration or confusion in different ways.

Conclusion

Here we took a closer look at affordances and signifiers. An affordance is the relationship between an object and a user: what can a person do with an object? For example, a person can open a door or increase the sound system's volume. A signifier is a perceivable cue about the affordance: how does a person discover the affordance? For example, a door handle or the label for the volume knob on a sound system.?

Affordances and signifiers are essential to make interfaces intuitive and easy to understand. If they are absent or poorly designed, people won’t know what your product does or how they can use them to solve their problems.

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