Affordances make actions possible, but signifiers show users where those actions are. When you remove the visual cues that say “tap here” or “click this,” usability drops fast no matter how clean the design…

pretty much

your brain hates blank space, so it fills it with the nearest sample: you

Around 2013, the design industry started treating visual cues like a problem to be cleaned up.

it’s like taking the handles off doors because the room looks cleaner. technically the door still opens. good luck

annoyingly, no

asking helps, but the chapter is warning you about the gap between what feels true and what survives contact

That was not a coincidence. Apple shipped iOS 7 that year and stripped six years of visual signals from the iPhone interface in one release. Windows 8 had done…

yep. designers keep blaming the wrong thing is the trap door

then it shows up as flat design exposed the problem

In 1979, the psychologist James Gibson introduced the idea of affordances in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.

put the cue back. contrast, shape, label, underline, whatever makes the action findable

stop calling invisible controls elegant

and if a choice only works for informed, patient, caffeinated people, treat that as a bug

that’s the series tbh

design psychology is mostly noticing the human nonsense before it ships

deal. hydrate first