Specifications

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• Cognitive Affordance
• Physical Affordance
• Sensory Affordance
• Functional Affordance
It is worthwhile to look at the remote control and on-screen
menu with relation to each of these affordance.
Cognitive Affordance
Cognitive affordance is a feature of design that helps the user
know how to do something. Good cognitive affordance on the remote
control is the clearly labelled button for zoom, focus and volume. It
can be clearly seen from our evaluation that all the users were easily
able to locate the volume button. There is also poor cognitive
affordance on the remote control, the point button (the round large
button in the centre) and the select button confused users, as there is
no labelling on them. When the users in our evaluation pressed the
menu button they didn’t know how to do their desired action this left
them feeling unsure of their choice to press the menu button and
many press the menu button again thinking they had done something
wrong.
Menu One
The on-screen menu offered very little cognitive affordance.
Using only images in the menu offered little information as to what it
does. If you look at the menu in Menu One it is very difficult to know
what each image represents. Don Norman in his principles for screen