Regarding availability, we first need to understand what role it plays in our design.A view recognized by designers is that good design is intuitive. There are countless ingenious and intuitively designed things around us, including new and old things. So what is the secret to making the design intuitive? An important part of it has to do with perception.
A good design is not enough just to be rational and logical. Great, intuitive designs are those that allow us to directly and correctly see what we can do with one thing. This is the logical theory given to us by availability. The use of availability is not limited to the design of physical objects. In fact, this concept is particularly attractive to designers of graphical user interfaces. Compared with traditional industrial designers, user interface designers can define the visual attributes of the objects they create more freely and easily. Examples of user interface elements that provide such strong clues are clickable buttons and protrusions, draggable sliders and SPINN-enabled controls, and other elements that more or less directly suggest appropriate user actions.
We can learn from the text that availability is determined by the environment and the animal (or more specifically, the ability of the animal to act). For example, a chair can allow animals with specific bodies to sit down-in other words, for these animals, it is sitable. Some animals can climb mountains (while others cannot), needles can be pierced (for humans and not, for example, dogs), and so on. Therefore, we can know that tools are one of the main types of meaningful objects in the environment. Next, we discuss electronic equipment and its availability. Possible operations on the system include physical interaction with devices such as the screen, keyboard, and mouse. But the role of availability does not end with the physical aspects of the system. The application software also provides possible operations. The word processor provides high-level writing and editing functions, but it also provides click, scroll, drag and drop functions. The functions that the user can call are the availability in the software.
Regarding perceived availability, the difference from availability is that availability is an existing fact, and availability is to perceive meaningful availability. For example, a popular interactive design textbook will Availability is described as a term, “…used to refer to the properties of an object that allows people to know how to use it.” (Rogers et al., 2011). When a user wants to use an application or a product, availability already exists. We add guidelines to it to ensure that users can easily understand how to use it. I think this should be the meaning of perceiving availability.
The result of learning is that participants gradually adapt to their environment at a higher level over a long period of time. No matter how insightful and important, these studies have limited relevance to design. New designs are usually destructive. By providing new availability, they can cause major changes in the environment and create a demand for new learning efforts. Anticipating these needs and effectively supporting users’ learning requires understanding how the participant-environment relationship recovers when an interruption occurs—that is, at the moment when the new availability replaces the old one, and the actors’ ability to gain What happens between moments directly perceive the new revelation. Explicitly considering availability means that supporting users to discover availability and learn how to use them should be a key concern for designers.
Affordance of an iPad
Here are some of the features of the iPad I have listed:
iPad can record, edit and play audio and video.
iPad can capture and store digital images.
iPad can edit and store electronic documents.
iPad can check the date and time.
iPad can draw and store digital images.
iPad can edit and record reminders and memos.
iPad can read and maintain digital books.
iPad can query recent weather, maps, etc.
iPad can transfer files between different users and devices more conveniently.
iPad can be more convenient to listen to news, blogs and check the stock market.
