Still, J. D., & Dark, V. J. (2008). An empirical investigation of affordances and conventions. [abstract] Paper presented at the meeting of the Third International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition, Atlanta, GA.
Norman (1999) emphasized the distinction between affordances (Gibson, 1979) and cultural conventions (Norman, 1988). It is possible that in the absence of affordances users develop conventions to resolve interaction ambiguity. However, some argue that conventions are not different than affordances (McGrenere & Ho, 2000). We explored this latter possibility through a button pressing task. Our results show that affordances exist when the spatial button configuration is congruent with directional cues. When affordances were not available, most participants demonstrated consistent button-to-action mapping that sometimes, but not always represent conventions. Additionally, employing conventions did not differ from acting on affordances.