Perceiving Affordances through Perceptual Information

The purpose of this study was to explore how users perceive the affordances of an object from specific operation tasks. These affordances can be specified in terms of perceptual information. To this end, the eye-tracking technique was employed to capture what product parts uses’ fixation focused on when using a product for specific operational tasks. The results show that, for physical-behavioral tasks, users were more interested in the physical properties that presented the affordance for product parts’ operation-ability and assembly-ability; for functional tasks, users were more interested in the artificial signs that presented the affordance for product parts’ functionality. In addition, this study proposed a feasible approach to exploring how users perceive affordances, which is contributive to applying the concept of affordance in product design.