Understanding computers and cognition
Understanding computers and cognition
Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication
Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication
Applying culture to website design: a comparison of Malaysian and US websites
IPCC/SIGDOC '00 Proceedings of IEEE professional communication society international professional communication conference and Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM international conference on Computer documentation: technology & teamwork
About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design
About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design
Human Performance Engineering: A Guide for System Designers
Human Performance Engineering: A Guide for System Designers
We can't afford it!: the devaluation of a usability term
interactions - The digital muse: HCI in support of creativity
Examining working memory load and congruency effects on affordances and conventions
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Affordances in HCI: toward a mediated action perspective
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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The concept of affordance as it applies to user interface design is widely used and accepted; possibly overused. This paper explores one of the constraints on affordance: culture. Graduate and undergraduate students in the United Kingdom and the United States were surveyed and asked to make judgements about the behaviour of abstracted Western-like objects. The study clearly shows that UK subjects thought the down position of a light switch indicates it is "ON"; for their US counterparts it was "OFF." We suggest that context (in the case of this study, culture) is often overlooked, but is central to affordance, to computer interface design, as well as to action and activity more generally.