Ao longo de todo este curso há um desencontro entre o conceito de affordance apresentado e aquele definido por Don Norman. O próprio Norman cita essa confusão na edição revisada de The Design of Everyday Things. Affordance é a relação que um design estabelece com seu usuário, atrelada às propriedades de ambos, não exatamente aquilo no design que demonstra como se fazer uso desta relação. Por exemplo, um texto que funcione como link possui a "affordance de clicabilidade e direcionamento" mesmo que não esteja escrito em azul e sublinhado. Se sublinhamos e colocamos em azul um texto que funciona como link, atribuímos a ele signifiers, mas não alteramos seu affordance. Norman (2013, p. 13-14) explica da seguinte maneira:
"Designers have practical problems. They need to know how to design things to make them understandable. They soon discovered that when working with the graphical designs for electronic displays, they needed a way to designate which parts could be touched, slid upward, downward, or sideways, or tapped upon. The actions could be done with a mouse, stylus, or fingers. Some systems responded to body motions, gestures, and spoken words, with no touching of any physical device. How could designers describe what they were doing? There was no word that fit, so they took the closest existing word—affordance. Soon designers were saying such things as, “I put an affordance there,” to describe why they displayed a circle on a screen to indicate where the person should touch, whether by mouse or by finger. “No,” I said, “that is not an affordance. That is a way of communicating where the touch should be. You are communicating where to do the touching: the affordance of touching exists on the entire screen: you are trying to signify where the touch should take place. That’s not the same thing as saying what action is possible.” Not only did my explanation fail to satisfy the design community, but I myself was unhappy. Eventually I gave up: designers needed a word to describe what they were doing, so they chose affordance. What alternative did they have? I decided to provide a better answer: signifiers. Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both."
